The US and Japan pretty much have the microprocessor design business to themselves, but now it looks as if Taiwan’s government-backed Computer & Communication Research Laboratories is trying to get in on the act. The Lab has a four-chip set design aimed long-term at Texas Instruments Inc’s MicroSparc, according to a story in last week’s Electronic Engineering Times. The trade weekly says that United Microelectronics Corp will produce the first commercial version of the chip set using a 0.6-micron CMOS process and pitching for a 50MHz, 39 MIPS CPU for availability oapart in the second half of the year. It has been designed to execute most single-word instructions in a single clock cycle through a four-stage instruction pipeline. The next step will be to wind the clock up to 80MHz, with further integration to follow. The Laboratory is catering to demand for local chips from Taiwanese Sparcsystem builders such as Tatung Electronics Co, Datatech Inc, Twinhead Inc, Sampo Inc and Chicony Inc.
