Sun Microsystems Inc intends eliminating all royalties that semiconductor companies pay to produce Sparc chips. The notion, now still in the proposal phase, is likely to become a reality later this year, no matter how the winds blow inside the IEEE P1754 subcommittee, which came into being a number of months ago to consider another highly political Sun proposal – a RISC microprocessor backed by the IEEE and based on Sparc. Sun figures its royalty-free stance is going to attract a bunch of previously hesitant Far Eastern semiconductor manufacturers to fabricate the Sparc.
