A scant two months ago, Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics division was busy fighting negative industry buzz about its strategy of aiming Java-based processors at the embedded market. But if the first public demos of the Java chips are any indication, the silicon will fly. "We have people coming up to us with interest in these boards," Harlan McGhan, technical marketing manager at Sun, told me during those demos at Comdex.
Indeed, the display of technology from NEC, Fujitsu, LG Semicon and Sun itself was impressive-both in its breadth and in the obvious engineering care lavished on the hardware. The only thing missing was a round of hype-filled publicity mongering. Instead, the technology spoke for itself in a dimly lit room away from the show floor. The coolest setup was running Sun's up-market Micro701, complete with a bunch of pull-up resistors that were epoxied at the last minute to the top of the chip's case.
As yet, Sun's Java-chip licensees haven't committed to building the 701. That may be because they see the real market opportunities in deeply embedded, customized applications. For example, NEC is targeting the microcontroller segment with plans for semi-custom implementations at the low end of the market. One NEC tactic to trim costs will be to build microcontrollers based on the picoJava core, but without its cache and floating-point unit.
For its part, Fujitsu will serve customers seeking full-custom implementations for high-volume applications with its system-on-a-chip strategy. (One significant aside: Fujitsu didn't demonstrate picoJava at Comdex. Rather, it showed JavaOS running on SparcLite silicon. The OS will be up on the company's picoJava II-based core in early 1999.)
The only off-the-shelf proponent appears to be LG Semicon. LG reps were not present at Sun's Comdex demo. But an LG part designated "MJ1" was used in a set-top box shown off by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (Seoul). When I contacted LG independently, company officials confirmed that the MJ1 is currently being tested and that another part, the MJ501, is in development.
That leaves Patriot Scientific Corp., which is selling an independently designed Java processor designated the PSC1000. Patriot is billing its chip as the only offering you can buy today.
Moving forward, it looks clear that the Java chip business will evolve into one of providing intellectual property-in the form of Java cores and peripherals-specifically tuned for OEMs requiring application-specific devices.
