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Taiwan-based chipset vendor ULi plans to begin mass production of a new all-in-one chip solution for AMD K8 processors in the second quarter of this year and aims to begin manufacturing its first product with dual-channel DDR2 memory support at year-end, according to the company’s associate vice president Bruce Tai.

The all-in-one solution, the M1697, will follow another ULi northbridge for the AMD K8 platform, the M1695. Both products are expected to be ready for mass production around May. The M1697 is very interesting because it’s designed to integrate a lot of features, including support for legacy interfaces such as parallel ATA, and new prospective technologies such as SATA II and High-Definition Audio. In addition, the chip has some security functions that support the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 1.2 specification developed by TCG (Trusted Computing Group).

With so many features integrated on-chip, ULi hasn’t yet disclosed the die size or the manufacturing process technology. Both the M1695 and the M1697 will support all AMD K8 processors, including the recently announced Turion 64, Tai indicated. According to ULi, M1695-based motherboards are expected to be launched at Computex in June. “Currently we can’t disclose any information about which motherboard vendors will support the product. It’s still too early,” Tai said.

ULi’s first dual-channel DDR2 northbridge will be the M1691. In keeping with the M1683 and M1685 (due to begin mass production next month), the product is designed to support both Pentium 4 and Pentium M processors. ULi is the only chipset vendor to provide such a product. “From an architectural viewpoint, there is no big difference between the Pentium 4 and the Pentium M front-side buses, they both use the same P4 bus,” Tai noted.

Currently almost all of ULi’s chipsets are manufactured in 0.18-micron process technology, at UMC facilities, according to Tai. “Later this year we plan to move to 0.13-micron process, with the next generation of our products. One of these products will be the M1691,” he said. The chip will support a 1066MHz FSB and PCI Express (PCIe) x16, as well as a Hyper-Transport interconnect to the southbridge.

In contrast to most of the chipset vendors, none of ULi’s PCIe-supporting products are certified by the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) yet. The M1695 is expected to be the first one to be certified, according to Tai.

more @ http://www.digitimes.com/bits_chips/a20050221PR204.html

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