London, UK-based Psion Plc yesterday announced the formation of a new company, Psion Software Plc, to license its operating systems and applications. On offer will be the 16-bit EPOC/16 environment from the Psion Series 3 products, and the 32-bit EPOC/32, which is being developed for future high-end palmtop computers, communicators and smart phones, and is written for the Advanced RISC Machines Ltd ARM RISC. With Advanced RISC, Psion has already specified a Personal Digital Assistant on a chip, the CL-PS7110, based on the ARM7100 core, which is being fabricated by Cirrus Logic Inc, and a StrongARM counterpart is being developed with Digital Equipment Corp’s Digital Semiconductor. The EPOC/16 environment runs on an 8086-compatible processor: the original Series 3 models used NEC Corp’s V30H.
