Motorola Inc’s M-Core processor core is to be used as the basis for future personal digital assistants developed by Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea. ETRI is leading one of 17 strategic development projects funded by Korea’s Ministry of Information and Communication, and is intended to speed up Korea’s development of handheld multimedia information computing products able to compete in international markets.
ETRA, along with its project leader, mobile computing systems supplier JTEL Co Ltd, will uses M-Core as the basis for its own Intelligent Personal Client PDA, integrating digital signal processor functionality and auxiliary circuits for single chip operation. Motorola and ETRI also signed an memo of understanding, agreeing to cooperate in the development of microprocessors and DSPs, and JTEL says it also plans to use core Motorola technology for its memory device and LCD display. The first implementation, expected to be ready by 2001, will integrate multimedia and radio data communications functions on a single chip.
ETRI is also working with Sybase Inc to optimize Sybase’s UltraLite database technology for its operating system. UltraLite is intended to bring two-way server synchronization to the new PDA, allowing access to corporate databases and enterprise resource planning systems.
Separately, Motorola said it would license the M-Core architecture royalty-free to OEM customers and ASIC manufacturers within the Japanese domestic market, and said it would also make available key software for M-Core, including the KJava virtual machine it developed in conjunction with Sun Microsystems Inc.
