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                                                        The Florida SunFlash

             SMCC Announces Silicon Product Program

SunFLASH Vol 40 #11					          April 1992 
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    Silicon Vendors To Give Customers Early Access to Designs

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --April 7, 1992-- Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.
(SMCC) today announced it will make its silicon designs available to
selected semiconductor vendors, who will manufacture, sell and support
chips based on those designs worldwide.  These designs include SPARC(R)
CPU chips, ASICs and other system support chips.  SMCC is making its
chip technology available to earn greater returns on its silicon design
investments by making the designs available early to the broadest
possible customer base.

To encourage broad market acceptance, SMCC's licensed semiconductor
partners will involve their customers at the beginning of the design
process.  The company's current intention is to facilitate early design
adoption and volume sales as soon as silicon is production ready,
independent of SMCC's product availability.  SMCC will receive
royalties from its semiconductor partners, who will use their existing
distribution channels to market the chips.

The first example of this new SMCC program is an audio chip that is
intended for future SMCC systems.  Analog Devices and Crystal
Semiconductor today announced they have begun selling multimedia codec
chips designed in conjunction with SMCC.  These chips offer highly
integrated, advanced audio system functionality on a single device.

SMCC Leverages Design Expertise

Designing chips is a time- and resource-intensive, difficult process.
SMCC decided to launch this new silicon design program in order to give
SPARC vendors access to advanced technology that they might not
otherwise be able to develop on their own and also to enable SMCC to
broadly share R&D expenses.

"While we're well known for our system design, what's been less public
is our expertise in very sophisticated chip design," said Scott
McNealy, president of SMCC.  "Making these designs available -- early
-- will increase investments in SPARC and accelerate the innovation
curve in the overall SPARC market."

SMCC has occasionally licensed its designs in the past, such as silicon
designs found in its SPARCstation(TM) 2.  "The strong demand for these
silicon products convinced us to formalize the process of making our
custom silicon implementations available to the broad market," McNealy
added.  "Not only do computer manufacturers want access to these chips,
but so do silicon-intensive industries like aerospace, automotive and
manufacturing.  And it's right in line with our open systems philosophy
of creating published interfaces with multiple competing sources for
implementations."

SMCC, SPARC International Boosting SPARC Market

Besides announcing its intent to offer this silicon design program,
SMCC gave its support to the new SPARCBuilders(TM) program, unveiled
today by SPARC International, Inc.  This program will include a
portfolio of designs, hardware and software interfaces, tools and
implementations that can be used to design and build SPARC systems and
applications.  Included in the SPARCBuilders program are SBus, MBus and
the SPARC architecture.

The SPARC architecture will also be offered through the $99 SPARC
license from SPARC International, which gives licensees the right to
design, manufacture and distribute CPUs conforming to the SPARC
architecture.

Since SMCC believes that implementations should be made broadly
available, it will strongly encourage SPARC semiconductor vendors
licensing SMCC silicon designs to include their resulting products in
the portfolio.

According to International Data Corp., SPARC is the leading RISC
architecture, accounting for 63 percent of the workstation market in
1991.  Through Q4 1991, more than 580,000 SPARC microprocessors have
been shipped, according to SPARC International.  In addition, 43 system
vendors are shipping SPARC-based computers and 4,750 third-party
applications are available for SPARC systems.  SPARC products from
different vendors share binary compatibility because of the SPARC
Compliance Definition (SCD), whose most recent version, SCD 2.0, was
introduced today by SPARC International.


PR contacts:

Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.
Marty Coleman (415) 336-6543

Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.
Elaine Miller (415) 336-1031 

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