Samsung Introduces Home-Grown MCU for Portable Devices

Computergram International, May 18, 1999

Samsung Electronics Co has introduced a new RISC semiconductor design it says will make the firm less dependent on foreign imports for circuit designs and form the basis of a range of new portable digital products. The new design uses an 8-bit RISC core, dubbed CalmRISC, embedded into a micro control unit (MCU). A digital signal processor component can also be integrated with the chip, which has DSP and multimedia instructions, making it especially suitable for products such as MP3 and DVD players.

Samsung is pushing the design as a chip that offers high performance levels with low power consumption. Operating at 3 volts, the chip produces 20 MIPS while using 34 Amps. Samsung has spent 2bn Won ($1.7m) developing the chip and expects yearly sales to be worth $500m by 2002. Volume production is expected by the second half of this year. The latest home-grown design from the South Korean electronics firm comes after it recently introduced a CDMA mobile phone chip intended to replace components sourced from Qualcomm Inc.