Singapore Chip Developers Make A Splash At CES

Two chip suppliers from Singapore caught my attention at last month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Winedge & Wireless Pte Ltd. Ultra51, a RISC-based 8051 system-on-a-chip, offers 12 times the throughput of a legacy 80C51. It includes a large on-chip data RAM (up to 128 kbytes), four 256-byte RAM register banks, two analog-to-digital channels, and a melody generator. The controller's flash memory options range from 64 kbytes to 1 Mbyte. Prices start at about $7 each in 10,000-unit lots. Also, the company's WE3001 direct-sequence spread-spectrum processor costs about $4 in 10,000-unit lots. Two single-chip zero-intermediate-frequency FM/FSK transceivers, the WE905 (100 MHz to 1 GHz) and WE2408 (2.4 GHz), cost about $3 each in 10,000-unit lots.

The PSB Corp. VConnect is a 2.4-GHz wireless module optimized for delivering CD-quality stereo audio over any of three frequency modulation modes: adaptive hopping spread spectrum, frequency-hopping spread spectrum, and fixed-frequency. Based on a proprietary chip, they cost between $18 and $22/unit based on volume.