Xionics Document Technologies Inc has signed agreements with two major copier manufacturers for its XipChip and PeripheralPower software which it says enables high performance printers to be made at lower costs. The Burlington, Massachusetts company will not reveal the names of the two OEM customers, but describes the first as one of the world’s leading copier companies. The contract is for delivery of a minimum of 100,000 multifunction peripherals destined for the small business and home markets late next year. The second contract, with a well-known Japanese OEM, is for the development of a mid-range office peripheral. XipChip, developed jointly by Xionics and IBM Corp (CI No 2,886), is an integrated imaging parallel processor for multifunction printers and copiers. Xionics says manufacturers building printer controllers would previously have to use a central processor, and several separate application specific integrated circuits for functions such as compression and image processing. XipChip combines IBM’s PowerPC RISC processor for advanced printing, an advanced image processor and JBIG lossless compression/decompression and scan data processing on a single chip. Its memory management architecture supports Rambus Inc memory at up to 500Mbps (CI No 2,915). PeripheralPower is a set of software that includes Xionics’ Dataflow operating system, copy, scan and facsimile applications and third party software such as Adobe Systems Inc’s Postscript. The company says XipChip obsoletes existing systems that depend on board level connection of general purpose processors and multiple ASICS. The single chip is lower cost and more efficient, it says, enabling manufacturers to build multifunction devices, with the power of dedicated printers or copiers, for less than #1,000.
