PC Card chip touts ATM trnasfer rate
By Stacy Lavilla
NEC Electronics Inc. will announce at Comdex this week a
new microprocessor designed for PC Cards that supports
datatransfer rates of up to 2.5M bytes per second.
The TransProcessor chip will be demonstrated in the new
Trans PC Card at the annual Las-Vegas trade show.
Co-developed by NEC and Trans Digital Corp., the Type 1
Trans PC Card combines an integrated TransProcessor chip
and a 64k-byte, 16-bit TransROM memory chip.
SPEED
The TransProcessor supports transmission
rates that are eight to 10 timed faster than the
proposed enhanced parallel port specification
|
Users insert the Trans PC Card into a notebook PC and
connect the attached parallel cable to a desktop PC for
data transfers of 2.5M bytes per second and at distances
of up to 100 meters.
The technology allows notebook-to-desktop transmission
to support speeds comparable to asynchronous transfer mode
networks, according to officials at NEC in Mountain View,
Calif.
Traditional data-transfer packages are not as robust.
Traveling Software Inc's LapLink for Windows, for
example, supports data-transfer rates of between 3M and
5M bytes per minute over parallel cable up to 20 feet long.
The NEC processor technology is well-suited for file
transfers, data acquisition, multimedia technologies
involving the transfer of voice and video, and printing,
company officials said.
The TransProcessor chip is available to PC Card manufacturers
as a manufacturing kit. Software embedded on the TransROM chip
eliminates the need for software drivers to be loaded on the
host systems.
"For users transfering high quantities of information regularly
and who need to do it immediatly, this is a 'need to have'"type
of product, said Bill Ablondi, market analyst at BIS Strategic
Decisions, in Norwell, Mass.
The Trans PC Card is available for Trans Digital for $149.
A universal cable with two adapters may be purchased for
$49.
The Trans PC Card manufacturing kit, available to PC Card
manufacturers, also from Trans Digital, is priced at $750.
PC Week, November 13,1995.