LA JOLLA, Calif. -- SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (STM) has bought a majority stake in Metaflow Technologies Inc. and is using the Metaflow design team to create a new, general-purpose microprocessor.

The announcement of the purchase from Hyundai Electronic Industries Co. follows two years of collaboration between STM and the 40-engineer team at Metaflow, a developer of microprocessors. The size of STM's stake was not disclosed.

In existence for 10 years, Metaflow was originally backed by LSI Logic Corp. and worked on versions of the Sparc microprocessor architecture. It suffered a setback when it lost LSI Logic's support, but its fortunes revived when Hyundai bought a majority stake in 1994.

The latest sale came about for two reasons, said Val Popescu, founder and president of Metaflow. "One is that we have been heavily involved with [STM's] process-development work at 0.25 micron. We have physical design knowledge and have been producing test chips to help speed up development for them."

The second reason, Popescu said, "is our basic microprocessor architecture knowledge. We are applying that to a microprocessor design we are doing for them."

Popescu said the new design was not related to the Thunder chip, a Sparc device that was completed and successfully transferred to Hyundai. "It's a major microprocessor for release next year," he said.

Nor is the work related to Chameleon, STM's 64-bit RISC microprocessor, which has been in design in Europe for several years. "We know Chameleon well," said Popescu. "Chameleon is a set-top-box microprocessor. What we are doing is a general-purpose, mainstream microprocessor."

He said the architecture will make use of an enhanced version of out-of-order speculative-instruction execution, a technology for which Metaflow sought three patents in 1989.

The two companies have been working together for the last two years. In one of the latest projects, Metaflow is helping to develop part of the next-generation Mpact processor, based on technology SGS-Thomson licensed from Chromatic Research Inc., of Mountain View, Calif.

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