CHIP CHAT : Communications: A new generation of microchips allows a personal computer to talk to other PCs, send and receive faxes, screen calls and take phone messages.
“Hello. This is Dean’s personal computer. He’s not home right now, so please leave a message after the beep. If you want to send a fax, please dial the numeral ‘1’ now.”
The latest high-tech gadget--personal computers that operate as both fax machines and answering machines--could be delivering this message in six to nine months.
Rockwell International plans to ship a family of computer chips that combine the functions of a modem, a facsimile machine and a telephone answering machine. And several companies in Silicon Valley are racing to produce similar products.
“You will be able to retrieve a voice message stored on your computer by pushing a button,” said Lisa Simpson, a product manager for Rockwell Digital Communications in Newport Beach, one of the world’s biggest producers of microchips for computer modems. “It increases the usefulness of the PC.”
Rockwell expects to begin shipping the chips in the first quarter of 1992. By next fall, the chip could be designed into new personal computers or added to existing PCs by plugging in a circuit board, the company said.
Cirrus Logic, a Milpitas company, plans to market chips combining fax and answering machine features to manufacturers of portable notebook computers. The company hopes that computers with these features will be popular with traveling executives.
A business executive, for example, could plug the machine into a hotel room telephone line, leave the room and return to listen to messages. Cirrus’ two-chip set will be available in the first quarter of 1992. Other companies working on similar chips include Sierra Semiconductor and Yamaha Systems Technology, both of San Jose.
The Rockwell division has shipped more than 25 million modems worldwide and has 80% of the worldwide FAX-modem chip market. Modems are devices that enable personal computers to transmit data over telephone lines, coaxial cable or other mediums.
Rockwell executives are hoping the new chip products will account for 20% of division sales within a year after they hit the market, Simpson said. Rockwell, the El Segundo-based aerospace firm, does not disclose revenue for individual divisions.
The product is important to the Newport Beach unit, whose profits are growing but are under fierce, constant competitive pressure from hundreds of small modem producers. The division employs 3,000 people.
“Rockwell is a leader in developing new products and then moving on to something new when the competition becomes too fierce,” said Dean McCarron, an analyst at In-Stat, a Scottsdale, Ariz. market research firm.
The worldwide modem chip market is expected to reach $217 million in 1991, up one-third from $164 million in 1990, McCarron said. The market’s growth has been propelled by brisk sales of FAX machines, which have modems built inside.
The market’s growth has been spurred by the ability of semiconductor manufacturers to produce smaller chips with increasingly complex electronic circuitry. The costs of adding answering machine features to a computer were once prohibitive, requiring numerous chips.
In 1987, advances in chip technology gave rise to FAX modems for personal computers. In the past year, industry engineers have developed so-called digital answering machines, which instead of a tape recorder and cassette operate with a chip that stores voices in computer memory. Now Rockwell has evolved the chip another step by adding voice-compression technology, which enables the chip to process sound messages by converting the sound signals into bits of digital data that a computer can understand.
These digital answering machines will offer nifty features like the ability to skip messages, to save one in a string of messages or leave a private message for a specific person. These machines can be programmed to recognize the phone number of an incoming call and identify the caller, allowing call screening. Pacific Bell offers some of these features in its new service called Message Center, a voice-mail system for residential or business telephone customers.
Rockwell will market its chips to modem manufacturers, who will mount them on circuit boards that can be installed in personal computers. “The opportunities are promising because people with a PC need a modem and soon they will get this added feature for roughly the same price,” McCarron said.
Rockwell and other chip manufacturers are working to create industry-standard software that would allows the user to access the capabilities of the chip.
Initial boards will probably cost several hundred dollars, Simpson said, but the price should drop to $100 once the boards are mass-produced. That’s about the same cost as most FAX modems selling today.
One disadvantage of having an answering machine on a PC is that the computer would have to be turned on 24 hours a day.
Lack of protection against power surges, which could wipe out computer data, once made that a dangerous prospect. But Simpson said that is no longer a problem with most computers, since they are often protected with surge control devices now and can switch into low-power modes when not being used.
“People will just have to get used to having the computer on,” she said.
Answering the Call of the Future Rockwell International’s Digital Communications Division in Newport Beach has created a chip that can turn a personal computer into an answering machine.
Here’s how it works:
1) A message left by a caller is translated from analog signals, or voice form, to digital signals, a form that a computer can understand.
2) The digital message is electronically compressed and coded, a process similar to converting a longhand note to shorthand. This reduces the amount of physical memory space needed to store the message by up to 80%.
3) The compressed message is sent to the computer’s hard-disk memory, which can store from 4 minutes to 8 minutes worth of messages per megabyte (the equivalent of about 500 typed, double-spaced pages).
4) To replay the messages, the user punches a button which activates a program that decodes the compressed message and translates it back analog signals which are played back through the computer’s speaker.
Source: Rockwell International Corp.
