National Semiconductor Aims for PC on a Chip by 1999

National Semiconductor Corporation (Santa Clara, Calif.) will put a PC system on a single chip by mid-1999, the company announced yesterday. The chip would replace the dozen or more separate chips typically found in a PC today, improving PC performance and lowering the cost for PC manufacturers and their customers.

"National has assembled, through acquisition and internal development, all the pieces it needs to integrate a PC on a single chip," said Brian Halla, National CEO, at the Semico Summit, a semiconductor industry conference in Phoenix, Ariz. "We have all the intellectual-property building blocks and the methodology to stitch them together onto a square of silicon less than half an inch wide."

The company is currently defining versions of the chip for major PC and information appliance manufacturers. Versions are in the works for both the desktop market, where it will give consumers smaller, quieter machines, and the notebook market, where the low power drain of the super-integrated chip will significantly extend battery life for portable users, Halla said. Other key features include high clock speed, built-in communications, and high-resolution graphics.

The chip is aimed at expanding the entry-level market that has grown so rapidly over the past year, as sub-$1,000 PCs from top-name manufacturers brought an end to the traditional dominance of the $2,000 price point in PC sales. The chip is being built around microprocessor cores developed by Cyrix, the processor company that merged with National in November 1997. (An integrated Cyrix processor powered the first sub-$1,000 computer that Compaq introduced in February 1997.)

National's approach to system-level integration employs on-chip distributed processing, in which different parts of the chip are optimized to perform specific functions such as multimedia or communications, as opposed to running every function through a single premium-priced processor. "Assigning the tasks to specialized engines is the smart way to provide great performance at a reasonable cost," said Halla.

The chips will be manufactured initially at National's new wafer fab in South Portland, Maine, on 0.25-micron process technology that can be further scaled down to 0.18 micron. The plant has a capacity of 30,000 wafers a month, which translates to tens of millions of chips per year. National has assigned the responsibility for coordinating its first PC on a chip to its design center in Herzlia, Israel, which has designed many of the peripheral chips that surround the processor on a typical PC motherboard.

Edited by Beth Brindle