Patriot Scientific Corp, the small San Jose chip maker touted to be first to market with a Java processor, has completed the first phase of testing its PSC1000 chip and the initial manufacturing process. The company will debut the chip at Miller Freeman’s Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose on September 29. The wafers were packaged in Taiwan at the end of last week and delivered to the company. Patriot has ported Sun Microsystems JavaOS operating system and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to silicon in the shape of its PSC1000 chip, formerly known as ShBoom. It was manufactured using a 0.5 micron process. Also at the show, Patriot is due to announce around four deals with manufacturers of either motherboard or perhaps personal computers, most of which are expected to be from the Far East. Patriot has mapped out plans for a prototype network computer – due to be ready by September 15 – to demonstrate the chip running Java. Sun has admitted that Patriot will beat it to market with a Java chip, as its picoJava core and microJava chip are not due until well into next year. Observers of the stock, which has fallen from $2.25 in mid-June to just $1.26 at Monday’s close, wonder whether Sun itself may be sniffing around the technology or even the company itself.
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