Parthus to license Arm-based chip for smart phones, PDAs

Parthus to license Arm-based chip for smart phones, PDAs
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
October 19, 2000 (2:28 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001019S0019

LONDON -- Parthus Technologies plc in 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 in 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 third-generation (3G) handsets, 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, based in 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 Symbian Ltd. in 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.