PicoPower slates 'Super 486' chipsets

Electronic News, June 12, 1995

FREMONT, CALIF.--PicoPower will today introduce the Sequoia family of 486 chipsets supporting what the Cirrus Logic subsidiary termed "super 486" class microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix, IBM, Intel and Texas Instruments that provide up to 50MHz bus speeds and level 1 writeback cache. The Sequoia rollout follows a recent Intel-PicoPower agreement for PicoPower to develop chipsets for Intel's embedded 486s (EN, April 10, May 1).

There are three members of the new, two-chip Sequoia chipset family, offering designers a choice of 160-pin plastic quad flat pack (PQFP), 176-pin thin quad flat pack (TQFP) or 144-pin TQFP packages.

Sequoia also provides a set of power management features designed to enable the development of a PC for the consumer market with "smart home appliance" characteristics very similar to consumer-based entertainment products, according to Michael Maia, PicoPower's VP of marketing.

The Sequoia chipset, manufactured on 0.6-micron CMOS process technology, can automatically enter a deep sleep mode to lower system board power usage to 2 watts and then return to full operation with a keystroke, the company said, allowing users to resume the last application running prior to sleep without a time-consuming reboot of the system. Similarly, should a call come in to a modem-equipped system during the deep sleep mode, the system can instantly resume operation using a 'ring wake-up' feature and take the call. Additional features of the Sequoia system controllers include: a zero-wait-state level-2 cache controller, memory bank interleaving, a VESA Local Bus master supporting up to a 50MHz bus, extended data out (EDO) DRAM support, and instant-on capability.

The Sequoia family includes: PT86C618A2 and PT86C668A2-B for desktop computers in 160-pin PQFPs; PT86C718A2 and PT86C768A2-B for notebook computers in 176-pin TQFPs, and PT86C818A2 and PT86C868A2-B for embedded applications are in 144-pin TQFPs. PicoPower said BIOS support is available from American Microsystems Inc., Award, Microid Research, Phoenix and SystemSoft.

Pricing for all Sequoia system controllers is $40 each in sample quantities, which are currently available. Quantity production and pricing availability is scheduled for 3Q95.

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