VLSI Technology Inc and Intel Corp have decided against extending their July 1992 technology agreement for joint development of a low power consumption version of the 80386 for portable devices, and Intel will sell the VLSI shares it bought to seal the deal – a decision it will no doubt regret as VLSI turns into a super-high-flyer a few years from now, although it may have been part of the agreement that Intel would have to sell the shares if the deal were terminated; the fruit of the agreement was the Polar 80386 chip set for hand-held computers, which will ship this quarter but VLSI says sadly that the market for handheld devices has developed more slowly and with dramatically lower volumes than it had hoped; Intel currently holds 5.36m VLSI shares and a warrant for an additional 2.68m of the shares.
