The portable, palmtop and notepad boom has enabled National Semiconductor Corp to leap into the glue logic business where it has not been a significant player in the desktop market, and the Santa Clara company yesterday unveiled a new offering, the PC87334VJG SuperI/O device, which it claims enables a full 80486 personal computer input-oitput electronics to be crammed onto a seven square inch motherboard, claiming that to be the smallest on the market. Designed to be used in conjunction with PicoPower Inc’s Fir systems controller, the PC87334VJG operates on 3V and features active power management for over eight hours of battery life. A 7 AT double-sided board can take the PC87334VJG, Fir system controller, 80486 CPU, 4Mb memory, local bus graphics, serial infra-red communications, keyboard controller and two PCMCIA slots – the whole thing no more than 5mm. The new chip includes floppy disk controller port multiplexed on the parallel port for external floppy disk and tape drives, and an IDE interface that supports two IDE hard drives. Sampling next quarter, the part costs $20 for 100-up.
