Not in the least put off by Phoenix Technology Ltd’s plans to withdraw from Sparc development efforts, Sun Microsystems, as reported (CI No 1,262) is to provide a further impetus to the policy of licensing its technology to all comers by putting the specifications of its SBus architecture into the public domain. The move means that all critical components needed to build systems compatible with its own Sparc-based workstations are now available. First the processor itself, then software – SunOS, NFS, Open Look, X/NeWS, the X/View toolkit and the C programming language, and now the SBus. To encourage development an SBus Developer’s Kit and support services are to be made available, along with a circuit board needed to connect SBus cards to the bus, produced in conjunction with LSI Logic Corp. SBus architecture enables add-in boards to be installed into systems, and the specification is described as the technical roadmap that designers need to develop boards and systems. Sun claims 125 companies, including the likes of Texas Instruments, Seiko Epson Co and Solbourne Computer Corp have already signed up for the technology. In addition Sun says it will license its own implementation of the SBus to interested parties – presumably those that want to develop clone systems. The developer’s kit costs $300 in the US, UKP250 in the UK. The Direct Memory Access interface chip designed by Sun for the SBus is available directly from LSI Logic. And Sun has announced a $10.3m order from electronic design automation specialist Daisy Systems Corp, now including Cadnetix Inc, for Sparcstation desktops, workstations and servers.
