At Hannover, National Semiconductor Corp entered the single-chip speech processing market with the NS32AM160 32-bit speech processor with built-in signal processing. The chip is for applications such as digital answering machines, telephones with facsimile capability, intelligent voice response systems and speech recognition. NatSemi also boasted of the launch of two laser printers, the PG404 from Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and the TN7501 from Toshiba Corp, using its NS32GX32 embedded CPU. But as for its 64-bit 50 MIPS to 100 MIPS Swordfish core processor with built-in signal processor, part of the same family, it would say only that the chip would be the basis of a new high-end family of processors to be introduced during the decade. Swordfish, disclosed back in January 1991, (CI Nos 1,582, 1612), a 0.8 Micron CMOS superscalar part, is upwards-compatible with the NS32000 family, so that customers can begin designing systems now. The company envisages it will be used in high-performance network servers, colour PostScript print and facsimile servers, real-time systems, multimedia and interactive databases. Swordfish promises two independent integer units, floating point unit, instruction and data caches, bus arbiter, dynamic bus sizing and interrupt controllers. To support it, NatSemi has introduced the SF641 vector board, built on an AT motherboard so that developers can experiment on MS-DOS-compatible boards.
