National puts analog to work in SuperI/O chips

National puts analog to work in SuperI/O chips
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — National Semiconductor Corp. will target the consumer PC market with versions of its SuperI/O chips that leverage the company's analog expertise to include voltage- and temperature-monitoring functions. The devices are sampling now, and will go into full production when Intel Corp.'s Camino and Whitney chip sets go into volume production.

National, which gets about 10 percent of its overall revenue from the SuperI/O sector, announced five SuperI/O chips that support the low-pin-count (LPC) SuperI/O standard developed with Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.). However, Intel's cancellation of the Pentium IIX6 (PIC6) chip set, and the delays of the Rambus-capable Camino and Whitney chip sets pushed back the LPC SuperI/O market to the second half of 1999. Camino and Whitney are expected to appear later this year.

Mark Kahmarek, marketing manager at National's SuperI/O business unit, said that while National dominates the SuperI/O market for desktops in the commercial arena, resulting in an overall lead in the SuperI/O sector, it has not done as well in the consumer end, where suppliers like Winbond Electronics Corp. (Taipei, Taiwan) have dominated.

As the consumer and sub-$1,000 sector grows to nearly half of PC system shipments, more of the first-tier PC suppliers are outsourcing box manufacturing to Taiwan. That means National must put on "a full-force effort to penetrate the consumer manufacturers in Southeast Asia," said Kahmarek.

Some estimates predict that as many as 40 million sub-$1,000 PCs will be sold this year, fully half of the total desktop market of about 80 million units. Laptops will account for another 25 million units and servers 5 million units.

Besides supporting the general-purpose I/O functions of serial, parallel, and other interface functions, National has included advanced wake-up, security protection against chassis intrusion, and what National calls "health monitoring" capabilities, i.e., making sure the system doesn't overheat. That ability to monitor the voltage and thermal condition will be offered both on a commercial chip and a consumer chip called "commercial doctor I/O."

The LPC standard needs 24 fewer pins than the ISA interface. The SuperI/O chips from National come in a 128-pin thin quad flat pack, a lower-cost package. National's commercial- and consumer-use solutions are pin-compatible and allow OEMs to use the same motherboard design for both markets.

National's SuperI/O engineering group worked with the company's analog division to create a self-calibrating temperature sensor. And the commercial and consumer "doctor" versions of the SuperI/O product line will be able to measure a greater number of internal voltage levels.

"We think National is unique among the SuperI/O vendors in our ability to integrate high-end analog functions," said Kahmarek. "We didn't just schlock on an analog function."