The five semiconductor companies that have been licensed by Sun Microsystems Inc to fabricate the Sparc 32-bit RISC microprocessor for the merchant market have come together to create the Sparc Vendor Council to continue and accelerate the momentum of the Sparc effort under the member companies’ own direction. The five are Bipolar Integrated Technology, the Advanced Products division of Fujitsu Microelectronics, LSI Logic Corp, Texas Instruments Inc and the Ross Technology subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. The Council is chartered to promote Sparc and ensure the continuity of the architecture’s openness, performance and scalability. Sparc was designed to be implemented in a variety of process technologies – CMOS, Bi CMOS, ECL, GaAs.
