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Taking on Intel, Microsoft As both prepare NetPC, National moves to buy Cyrix By Rick Boyd-Merrit, EE Times Santa Clara, Calif. -- National Semiconductor Corp. and Cyrix Corp. (Richardson, Tex.) will take the next step in their plan to redefine and dominate the low-end of personal computing when they unveil in the next few weeks their reference designs for NetPC-class entry-level computers. Word of the NetPC plans comes on the heels of the announcement this week of the proposed acquisition of Cyrix by National in a stock swap valued at $550 million. The merger was the most high-profile move to date in a road map laid out by National's CEO to turn the supplier of standard analog and communications ICs into a systems-on-a-chip company, tying its fortunes to the emerging but unproved market for sub-$1,000 information appliances. Although the planned NetPC launch shows National has been doing its homework, analysts say the company still has its work cut out for it, particularly in process and design technology, if it is to become a provider of mainstream microprocessors and systems-on-silicon. The forthcoming NetPC designs are aimed at business systems that will sell below $1,000 and compete with existing NetPCs as defined by Intel and Microsoft. National and Cyrix are expected to roll out designs using the Cyrix MediaGx, an integrated processor, and the M2 (a.k.a. 6x86MX), Cyrix's current top-of-the-line microprocessor. The M2 design is expected to use National's PC87550 core-logic chips; the MediaGx design will use an unannounced integrated Super I/O part from National. The new designs are calibrated to show National in a leading role in defining entry-level PCs using integrated silicon based on Cyrix CPUs and National's peripheral chips. "With this merger, we now have all the pieces to put together a system on a chip," National's president and CEO, Brian Halla, said in a conference call announcing the merger. "That will help us bring computing to the masses and move the PC market from sales of 70 million units to 700 million units a year." "Initially, National did not have the kind of process technology to do the systems chips we were talking about, and we lacked a time-to-market design methodology. Now, all our design groups have been focused on making their new designs in sharable cells," said Mike Bereziuk, general manager of National's Personal Systems group. Plenty of work remains. National's senior managers in charge of design tools met for the first time with their counterparts at Cyrix's Richardson headquarters recently. The Cyrix M2 is currently built by IBM Microelectronics in a 0.35-micron process using five layers of metal. A would-be Cyrix foundry run by SGS-Thomson Microelectronics in Carrolton, Tex., had difficulty putting the parts in production, a problem one Cyrix source attributed to old equipment. National had less than the latest gear in use last year when Gobi Padmanabhan, the company's senior vice president of process technology, came on board from LSI Logic, where he had worked closely with Halla. At that time, the company was making some parts in a 0.65-micron process. "Process development was in bits and pieces," said Padmanabhan. "The technology was being driven by three or four separate groups. They lacked a clear technology road map, and they didn't have clear finish dates for their projects. It was more of a hobby shop," he added. Under Halla , the company opted to skip over development of a straight 0.5-micron process and bring up 0.35 geometries instead, using a modified version of that process for some designs requiring 0.5-micron work. Today, the company's new fab in South Portland, Me., expects to qualify its first 0.35-micron production runs in October using a 256-kbit SRAM technology driver and building Super I/0 parts that require three levels of metal. In a month, the company expects to have finished installing chemical mechanical polishing systems that will give the fab the ability to build five layers of metal. Meanwhile, an R&D fab in Santa Clara is working on qualifying a 0.25-micron process by the end of the year that could be transferred to Maine by the middle of next year. The R&D facility will then proceed with work on a 0.18-micron process it hopes to qualify by the end of 1998, though Padmanabhan said it will be at least a month before he knows if the Maine fab will be able to handle that process. "We have moved through three generations in 18 months compared to one generation in that time frame elsewhere," said Padmanabhan. Linking the CAD tools and libraries of Cyrix and National will be a key factor in how rapidly the company can manufacture M2 processors, he added. (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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