Santa Clara, California based National Semiconductor Corp is still looking for hot new chips to make, and favours the communications end of the business, so what more natural than that it should leap in and sign up to fabricate Asynchronous Transfer Mode cellswitching chips designed to the technology developed by Network Equipment Technologies Inc’s Adaptive Corp affiliate: the agreement makes NatSemi the first local area network semiconductor company to endorse Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a technology that Gartner Group has predicted will generate almost $1,000m in equipment sales by 1997; the agreement uses Adaptive’s interface technology to form the basis of future chip sets from National.
