Java processor prodigy Patriot Scientific Corp duly unveiled its PSC1000 Java chip at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose yesterday. The San Diego, California-based company says it will ship the 0.5 micron processor to customers during the next three months, but didn’t announce any new licensees as some had expected. It is believed to be the first public demonstration of a chip running Java natively. Sun Microsystems Inc and Rockwell International Inc are also preparing Java chips. Patriot says the 100MHz device will be available in 5 and 3.3 volt versions. We were not able to get hold of any performance numbers by press time, or find out whether Patriot was running the JavaOS operating system from Sun that it is porting to the chip or an older operating system, although it did say in a release that it was still in the process of porting JavaOS and the Java virtual machine from Sun. The company has built a prototype of a network computer with which to demonstrate the chip, but has no intention of marketing NCs.
