News
System-on-a-Chip
IBM announced technology designed to reduce advanced "system-on-a-chip" development time and cost by as much as 50 percent. Faster, cheaper availability of specialized chips can help electronics manufacturers transform standalone products into pervasive computing devices, boost the speed of Internet communications gear and provide new options for e-business applications.Highlights of the announcement include:* An IBM chip technology that allows pieces of chip designs (or "cores") from multiple sources to be plugged together to create entire new chips * IBM’s architecture for building highly-integrated chips quickly and efficiently using this technologyThe first example of such a chip from IBM: a new, high-performance PowerPCTM-embedded Key to the announcement is CoreConnect, an IBM-developed "on-chip bus" standard. An on-chip bus is a communications link that provides a way for pieces of chip design to be connected together to form a whole new chip.