Press Release
2002.06.19
Sunplus Announces SMS Solution for Home Telephone of Chinese Market
Science-Based Industrial Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. June 19, 2002 - Sunplus Technology Co. Ltd., the largest consumer IC design house in Taiwan, announced the Caller ID chip SPT6608 with Short Message Service (SMS), which supports CTSI (China Telecom Service Interface) protocol standard. SPT6608 enables the consumers to send and receive news, messages, weather forecast and more information from their home telephone. Manufacturers of telephone and design houses are developing their SMS telephones with Sunplus solution and expected to start volume production in 3rd quarter this year.

SPT6608 is equipped with Sunplus 16-bit m'nSP TM core, which is a combination of micro controller and digital signal processor on a chip. Features can be implemented by software efforts with limited hardware modification. Sunplus also provides IP library for customers' optional features such as voice recognition, synthesizing, digital recording, text-to-speech, hand-script recognition, etc. Meanwhile, the embedded memories could be allocated as databank for clock, calendar, notepad and game functions, as well as fonts database for Chinese, Kanji and English. SPT6608 also provides external Flash memory interface for flexible application software designed by customers. In a word, SPT6608 is not only the best cost/performance choice but also the fastest time to market solution.

Mr. Chin Nan Tseng, the Vice President of Sunplus Consumer Product Business Unit, indicates that SPT6608 is a highly integrated SoC (System on Chip)for Caller ID and SMS, and also digital answering machine. There are UART/IrDA interfaces for data communication between phone set and hand held devices like PDA or mobile phone. Customers can differentiate their product designs easily by using Sunplus' developing tools and optional function Ips. It helps customers to minimize the design lead time and enjoy the add-on value from faster time to market. SPT6608 is the best cost-performance solution compared with competitors' hardware decoded 8-bit micro controller.

SPT6608 is shipped for sample run and the mass delivery may start from 3Q2002. Since China Telecom is actively promoting "JiaJia-e" project, which is SMS on home telephone, there comes along with the tremendous demand for SMS telephone sets from the potential market of 180 million installed subscriber lines in China.