IBM Announces Chip for Internet-Attached Devices
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) announced on Thursday a semiconductor it said is designed for consumer-electronics devices connected to the Internet, continuing its push into what it and other high-tech players are calling ``pervasive computing.''
The IBM PowerPC Internet Appliance Platform combines a microprocessor with other capabilities such as touch-screen management, memory drivers and liquid-crystal display drivers and will cost about $60, IBM said.
The announcement by IBM is a continuation of a trend in the chip industry to combine more and more functions performed by multiple chips onto one chip. This becomes possible as engineering advances allow more and more transistors to be packed onto a single semiconductor.
IBM's Microelectronics division, based in East Fishkill, N.Y., would assemble most of the chip in advance for customers to help keep costs down, while the customers would still be able to modify the chip themselves for specific applications.
An IBM spokesman said that Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, the world's No. 1 computer maker, is already working with about six Japanese consumer-electronics companies that are planning to use the IBM chip in future products. The spokesman declined to name the companies.
IBM said that current microprocessors designed for personal computers are not flexible enough to lend themselves to practical use in battery-powered devices that are connected to the Internet
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