Toshiba licenses iReady Internet tuner

Electronic News, June 16, 1997

According to iReady, Toshiba will incorporate the Internet tuner into its ASIC library and introduce it as an ASIC core. The Internet Tuner allows an ordinary cellular phone to become Internet-ready at only a small cost and gives users easy wireless access to the Internet for E-mail and other information, iReady said.

"The era of Internet-ready consumer appliances is quickly becoming a reality, and by combining our unique Internet tuner technology with Toshiba's semiconductor capability, digital interactive and information capabilities will become standard, mainstream features," said Ryo Koyama, iReady president and CEO.

Under terms of the agreement, iReady and Toshiba will jointly develop a prototype core allowing a device to access text data on the Internet. This prototype will be the basis for future product integration from the Japanese company. iReady claims the IP core is portable to any manufacturing technology and will deliver maximum Internet performance while using minimal power and system resources.

"The technology agreement allows Toshiba to move forward aggressively in development of a new generation of Internet-ready consumer electronic products," said Tadatoshiu Minamikawa, GM of Toshiba's LSI Planning Division.

According to the company, Toshiba plans to roll out some of its devices, incorporating the core in the late 1997/early '98 time frame. In the longer term, Internet-ready faxes and television sets will appear sometime in 1998. iReady said the tuner supports all standard and several emerging Internet communication protocols and data formats such as HTML, graphics and E-mail. The company plans to introduce future generations of the tuner that will support video and telephony, Internet commerce standards and dynamic data via the Java operating system. iReady also said it expects to sign several similar licensing agreements by Q3 of this year.