Quality Issues Delay Intel Alviso Chipset
By Ann Steffora Mutschler -- EDN, July 19, 2004
Intel Corp. has confirmed another delay in delivery of one of its market-leading chipsets -- this time with the Alviso chipset, part of the revamped Centrino wireless line.
Last month, Intel admitted to working on replacing some Grantsdale and Alderwood chipsets that were suffering from manufacturing errors.
In the second half of this year, Intel had planned to update the Centrino mobile technology with the Sonoma platform, which included a new Pentium M processor with a 533MHz front-side bus, a Wi-Fi component that supports the 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networking standards along with the Alviso chipset.
According to an Intel spokeswoman, the chipset is still on track to ship late this year, but the formal industry launch will be early next year due to technical readiness and marketing factors that include its customers’ ability to customize the chipset to deliver in their products.
“Previously, the plan had been to do the launch along with shipping, but at this point after looking at the timing of customer readiness, it was decided to delay until early next year,” the spokeswoman told Electronic News.
Technical issues causing the delay stem from silicon readiness. Alviso is currently in one of the pre-production steps and has taped out a pre-production version, but has not taped out the production-ready silicon, the spokeswoman said.
Intel has received a pre-production test chip that it said did not meet the company's standard for quality. The spokeswoman did not provide further details.
At the time of the chipset’s introduction last September, Alviso was said to include a new graphics engine and support for PCI Express, according to Anand Chandrasekher, VP and general manager of Intel’s mobile platforms group.
Discussed again in February at its Developer Forum, Intel said Alviso would support third-generation graphics and enable support for devices and standards such as Direct Media Interface with improved bandwidth, TV-out, high definition audio, eight USB ports, four-port PCI Express, and up to 2GB of DDR2 memory. Further, the chipset will support Intel High Definition Audio with low power capabilities to reduce power consumption by allowing the processor to remain in a sleep state while audio activity is happening.
The delay is not expected to have a material financial impact, the spokeswoman said.
