Intel reworks its license with SST.
This agreement appears to be exclusive at this point...
techweb.com
Silicon Valley- Intel Corp. has amended its licensing agreement with flash supplier Silicon Storage Technology Inc., allowing SST to produce a flash component used in Intel's PC chipsets.
A spokeswoman for Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., said the company is phasing out internal production of its 82802 firmware hub, a flash chip with an Intel-specific interface containing the chipset's firmware. As a corollary to its newly acquired license, SST announced a flash-memory series that's both read- and pin-compatible with Intel's own firmware hubs.
The firmware hub is one of the two or three chips that make up the Intel 800 series of PC core-logic chipsets, including the 810, or Whitney, and the Intel 820, code-named Camino.
"But this technology may also appear in Internet appliances [and] set-top boxes," said Sohrab Kianian, director of technology licensing and business development at SST, Sunnyvale, Calif.
The Intel spokeswoman said the company is "end-of-lifeing" its own production of the 82802 and is passing off manufacturing duties to SST. Derek Best, vice president of worldwide marketing at SST, said the phaseout will occur over a few months and that OEMs should continue to procure chipsets from Intel but acquire the flash component from SST or other suppliers.
When asked if Intel plans to license other flash suppliers, the spokeswoman said, "Not at this point. And the operative phrase here is 'at this point.'"
SST officials said the agreement will enable it to offer more efficient flash memory supporting BIOS requirements in PCs based on Intel chipsets and microprocessors. Intel, by contrast, claimed the announcement will help its chipsets proliferate throughout the PC market, reducing OEM manufacturing costs in the process.
The new SST Firmware Hub products are based on the core feature set of SST's Multi-Purpose Flash series, which was created to use the company's SoftPartition uniform sector architecture and CMOS-compatible SuperFlash manufacturing process. The SoftPartition architecture uses uniform 4-Kbyte sectors and 64-Kbyte blocks.
The new family of firmware hubs, the SST49LF00x product line, will allow PC- system designers increased software granularity, which improves memory utilization, according to SST.
The approach will enable designers to fit the system BIOS and video BIOS firmware in a lower-density memory array than those of typical flash-memory devices, company executives said.
Volume production of SST's Firmware Hub SuperFlash products will begin this year, packaged in either a 32-pin TSOP or 32-pin PLCC. Samples of a 4-Mbit flash device organized as 512-K x 8 are available now for $3.50, with production slated for June.
Similar 2-Mbit, or 256-K x 8, devices will also ship in June, but will sample in May at $1.95. In September, SST will sample 8-Mbit, or 1-M x 8, devices for $5.50, with production beginning in November. All prices reflect lots of 100,000. |
