Apple Computer Inc said yesterday that it is licensing its Newton personal digital assistant technologies to a number of companies in an effort to make Newton a pervasive standard available to the computer, consumer and telecommunications industries. As well as Sharp Corp, companies to be involved with Newton include Motorola Inc, Siemens AG, Cirrus Logic Inc, Kyushu Matsushita Electric Co and LSI Logic Corp. As well as the agreement under which Sharp will license the ARM chip used in the Newton, Motorola will make a handheld device running the Newton operating system, and Cirrus will develop Newton-compatible chip sets for use both by licensees of the Newton operating system and by Apple itself for use in members of the planned Newton family. It will apply low voltage and mixed-signal technologies to liquid crystal display control, small-form-factor PCMCIA interfacing, digital wireless communications, data and facsimile modems, audio, and mass data storage. LSI will also manufacture an application specific integrated circuit for Newton, and Kyushu Matushita Electric says that it licensed the Newton operating system for use in future products. And as reported, Siemens Private Communications Systems Group plans to develop NotePhone, combining Siemens-Rolm telephony and Newton to provide telephone and facsimile.
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