One benefit to have come out of the kerfuffle over Motorola Inc’s RISC defectors is that it has brought into the open the fact that there will be a 68050 as well as a 68040. Motorola is withdrawing the lawsuit it launched three weeks ago against the defectors from its 88000 development team led by Roger Ross (CI No 1010). Ross, together with Carl Dobbs, Janet Sooch, Steve Goldstein and Trevor Smith, all involved in the design of Motorola’s 88000 RISC chip, left to form Ross Technology, a company part funded by Cypress Semiconductor to work on peripheral circuits for the Cypress Sparc program. Motorola, which had been seeking $8m damages, reached a preliminary agreement to withdraw the injunction, following assurances that employees would not compromise proprietary information on both the 88000 and 68000 series of processors. Court papers included mention of the 68050 processor, which Motorola had been rumoured to be working on as a follow-up to the 68040 (CI No 1014). A meeting in court on October 14 is expected finally to settle the dispute. Ross Technology, which is reportedly working on areas such as cache tag static RAM, cach data static RAM and memory management cache control units for the Sparc, has recently recruited a senior designer from the Advanced Micro Devices AMD29000 RISC team, Raju Vegeson, to be its chief architect for RISC products. The Cypress Sparc effort, which is to be second sourced by Texas Instruments, is to come under Ross.
