Parthus to license ARM-based chip design

Parthus to license ARM-based chip design
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
October 18, 2000 (3:05 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001018S0027

LONDON — Parthus Technologies plc (Dublin, Ireland) has designed a chip based on an ARM920T core from ARM Holdings plc, and intends to license it to smart-phone and personal digital assistant makers.

Parthus co-developed the chip, called Infostream, with Psion plc (London). Psion intends to use the technology in future PDAs and to license it to Motorola Inc. for use in forthcoming smart-phones.

Parthus said Infostream can also be used in 3G terminals, automotive terminals and Internet appliances.

Infostream leads the industry in performance, low power consumption and on-chip integration, Parthus said, though it has not quantified this claim. In essence Parthus has added peripherals to an ARM920T 32-bit processor licensed from ARM (Cambridge, England). According to Parthus, Infostream will operate at up to a 200-MHz clock frequency at 2.5 V or at 150 MHz at 1.8 V.

Infostream has been optimized to run the Epoc operating system of Sy mbian Ltd. (London), though it can also run Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket-PC and the Linux operating system.

A major feature of Infostream is the number of peripheral functions it integrates. These include a color LCD controller, a memory management unit, three UARTS, a USB controller, smartcard and multimedia card interfaces, ten-channel DMA for USB, AAC and MMC, and 40 kbytes of on-chip embedded SRAM to serve as a video frame buffer.