Japan’s open portable operating system, Tron – The Real-time Operating Nucleus – has not been the runaway success its backers hoped, but Hitachi Ltd has launched a high-end version of a G-micro chip based on the Tron specification. The chip has a performance of 100 MIPS in a 50MHz clock speed version, and a 130 MIPS performance in the 66MHz low-power 9W version. This is the highest performance registered to date for a complex instruction set chip, claims Hitachi. Samples of the 50MHz version will be shipped from October, with samples of the 66MHz version following in first quarter 1994. The G-micro H32/500 chip is manufactured to a 0.6 micron CMOS A1 3-layer process, using a superscalar architecture for instruction execution. These features make it ideal for communications control and high-speed real-time data processing, Hitachi suggests.
