Claiming that its three new application specific microprocessors (CI No 1,433) herald a new era in image communications, last week National Semiconductor set out what it sees as the future trends of this sector of the industry. Offices of the future, according to NatSemi, will be nothing without a multifunction imaging box, capable of faxing, printing and scanning pages, digital copying, data modem facilities and voice mail and messaging facilities. What’s more, it will all be desktop-sized. To endorse its view, National cited research carried out by BIS CAP, which suggests that the mutifunction peripherals market will be worth $1,478m by 1994. Accordingly the 32-bit CPU market in office peripherals will increase from the 21% of its current market share to 52%. As well as bringing out its new chips, National has set up five dedicated imaging centres across Europe to carry out further research and development. In an-swer to the big question of vulnerability of equipment that would handle so much of a com-pany’s applications, National stresses the importance of modular design – so that if one part goes wrong it can be unclipped for repairs without affecting the rest of the machine. The creation of bottlenecks is also an issue. The NS32GX320 embedded processor ena-bles a machine to perform several functions simultaneously, whereas the NS32FX16 for Group III faxes only enables them to done consecutively, a situation which NatSemi will be looking at. Dr Trattnig, NatSemi’s marketing director for imaging peripherals believes that adding value to products but maintaining price levels will be the primary mar-ket development in imaging peripherals over the next few years, even though NatSemi claims that its chips can cut costs by 30% in typical applications. – Sonya McGilchrist
