National Semiconductor Corp has unveiled plans to put a personal computer system on a single chip, resulting in substantially cheaper PCs. The Santa Clara company anticipates it will have the chip ready by the middle of next year when it will set about installing them in workstations and notebook machines. The company has all the intellectual property and methodology required to replace more than a dozen separate chips with a single device onto a square of silicon less than half an inch wide. The resulting device will enable users to have access to smaller, quieter machines, and in the case of notebooks, extended battery life. Other features will include high clock speed, built-in communication and high resolution graphics. The new chip will be built around microprocessor cores developed by Cyrix Corp, the company Nat Semi bought last year (CI No 3,293). The company says the new chip is aimed at expanding the entry-level market that has grown so rapidly over the last year. It will pose a big competitive challenge to Intel Corp, which has been working hard on continually lowering the entry level prices of PCs. A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests the new chip will enable PC prices to come down as low as $400 next year. For the first implementation of the chip, all the major PC functions will be integrated, with the exception of the memory and high voltage parts of the power supply, which will be integrated in future implementations. Initially they will be manufactured using 0.25 micron technology, which will be scaled further to 0.18 microns . Manufacturing will take place at the company’s new wafer fabrication plant in South Portland, Maine, which is capable of turning out 30,000 wafers a month.
