Still keeping up the stream of products that makes it child’s play – relatively speaking – to build AT bus and Micro Channel Architecture personal computers that can be sold in competition with those made by the majors, San Jose, California has extended its range of chip sets to match the latest versions of the Intel 80386 and 80386SX and the Harris Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc 80286s. The Chips 33MHz/386 Supercharger Solution is designed to accomodate the 33MHz version of the 80386, and enables manufacturers already using the standard Chips AT/386 and Chips/280 sets to get AT- and PS/2-compatible machines into production quickly at the higher speed. The Supercharger Solution is specifically designed to enable manufacturers to upgrade their existing production 16MHz, 20MHz and 25MHz designs to 33MHz working. They can get complete schematics from Chips & Tech immediately, the company says. The 25MHz New Enhanced AT set is claimed to be the fastest set of its kind in the industry, and accomodates the new Harris version of the 80C286. For those using the 80386SX, the company offers the 20MHz NEATsx set; both are designed to couple tightly with the company’s EMS Mapper Chip which provides up to 512 EMS registers for very fast task switching under MS-DOS. And to meet the future requirements of the OS/2 operating system, NEAT supports large memory configurations of up to 8Mb, page interleaving and shadow RAM for BIOS, and incorporates other OS/2-specific features. The NEAT and NEATsx sets comprise four VLSI devices that provide most of the system logic required to build a complete AT-compatible system. The NEATsx set is based on the AT set but has additional 80386SX interface logic. Both the AT-alike sets are offered in 84-pin PLCC and 100-pin PFP packages, and samples of the 25MHz NEAT and the 20MHz NEATsx sets are available now, with production quantities available in August – but if Intel has actually an nounced a 20MHz version of the 80386SX, it has passed us by perhaps Chips & Tech is ahead of the game and knows what is just around the corner at its San Jose neighbour.
