National buys Fairchild, sells Clipper

Newsfile National buys Fairchild, sells Clipper In a deal worth around $122M, National Semiconductor has bought the worldwide semiconductor business of Fairchild from Frenchbased electronics conglomerate Schlumberger. This announcement follows a protracted search for a buyer by Schlumberger, during which an offer by Fujitsu was blocked by the US government, which was unwilling for a major US defence contractor to fall into Japanese hands, and a buyout by the Fairchild management failed to raise sufficient financial support. A number of disused Fairchild manufacturing plants and their associated debts have been excluded from the deal with National. Charles Sporck, National's president and chief executive officer, commented: 'In acquiring Fairchild, National becomes America's best technologically balanced semiconductor supplier, with leadingedge capabilities in CMOS and bipolar products across a broad stream of proprietary offerings. Our first priority will be to ensure continued service and support to both Fairchild and National customers worldwide.' One Fairchild product that will not be supported directly by National is the Clipper 32-bit microprocessor module. To avoid a clash of marketing interests between Clipper and National's own 32-bit Series 32000, the company has sold Clipper to the US-based Intergraph Corp., a major user of the processor.

VMEbus standardized After four years of effort, VMEbus revision C.1 was approved bythe IEEE as an international standard (IEEE 1014) earlier this year, following its standardization at the end of 1986 by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as IEC 821. Work is now in progress to standardize a VMEbus specification for instrumentation applications, based on revision C.2, and the VSB (VME subsystem bus, P1096) standard is due to be formally approved early in 1988.

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Acorn micros use RISC chip A range of workstations has been built by UK-based Acorn Computers around its 32-bit RISC microprocessor, the Acorn RISC Machine (Microprocessors MicrosysL (October 1986) page 459). The Archimedes range of computers comprises two series of machines, the 300 and 400 series, both of which are being aimed at the educational and research markets. The 300 series machines (priced from £800) are being marketed as a new 'BBC microcomputer', with the endorsement of the British Broadcasting Corporation (although the BBC was not involved in the specification or design of this product); the 'BBC 300 series' is being targetted at schools, colleges and home enthusiasts. The higherperformance 400 series machines (priced from £1400) are aimed primarily at higher education establishments, and also at the desktop publishing, interactive video systems and CAD sectors. Software support for the Archimedes range includes a new version of BBC BASIC - - with extended functions, procedure libraries and an Acorn RISC Machine assembler--together with versions of c, PASCAL, FORTRAN, PROLOG and others. Software emulation of the 6502 and 8088 microprocessors (used in the original BBC micro and the IBM PC respectively) is also available. Archimedes is based on an open architecture that allows expansion via peripheral modules (dubbed 'podules') that attach to the four-slot backplane of the 400 series or the optional two-slot backplane of the 300 series. Podules are being manufactured by Acorn and a number of other suppliers. Those initially available are I/O, ROM, MS-DOS and MIDI cards; future releases will include an Ethernet card for the 400 series, a floating-point unit, an SCSI card, a modem, a video frame grabber and a high-speed A/D interface. • Acorn has also produced a coprocessor card for IBM PCs and compatibles based on its RISC processor and a custom PC interface

Acorn's successor to the BBC micro: RISC based chip known as the 'Tube'. The RISC processor runs concurrently with the host PC, and is claimed to give speeds ol up to 4MIPS (million instructions per second). (Acorn

Computers Ltd, Cambridge Technopark, 645 Newmarket Road, Cambridge CB~ 8PD, UK. Tel: (0223) 214411 ) Industrial field bus developed An industrial field bus based on MilStd-1553B has been developed by ERA Technology of the UK. The bus is intended to improve plant-level communication with sensors, actuators, transmitters and local controllers, filling the gap left by the present absence of a suitable data bus standard for industrial local area networks. According to ERA, the field bus already meets the mandatory requirements of the draft specification proposed by the IEC, and the company plans to develop it further so that it will provide intrinsic safety for applications involving flammable atmospheres, supply power to remote final elements, and offer an extended bus length of 1.5 km. The Mil-Std field bus will help manufacturers with an investment in military data bus technology to enter industrial markets and will broaden the range of vendors whose products can be accommodated in open system interconnection, says ERA.

(ERA Technology Ltd, Instrumentation and Test Systems Department, Cleeve Road, Leatherhead, Surrey KT22 7SA, UK. Tel: (0372) 374151)

Microprocessors and Microsystems