Although we’re still a long way off finding Sparc RISCs embedded in consumer and home electronics devices, Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc Technology Business unit continues to advance the company’s embedded systems case. It has already described its plans for its ‘e’ series microSparcs in the embedded market (CI No 2,749) and has now got one of its core technology licensees, C-Cube Microsystems Inc, to ditch the four-year-old proprietary RISC architecture it uses in its Video RISC Compression Processor, in favour of a new generation of microSparc-powered multimedia engines. The C-Cube device will support MPEG-2 video compression and decompression, H.320 and H.324 encode and decode, audio and videographic functions. Sparc Technology has chosen a manufacturer for microSparc IIe, slated to ship in the second quarter of next year, but is not saying who has won its business: Fujitsu Ltd currently fabricates the microSparc II+.
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