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Costa Mesa, Calif., Military Electronics Maker Builds Watch-Size PC

Posted on: Friday, 22 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 23--Irvine Sensors Corp., a Costa Mesa maker of military electronics, announced Friday that it has built a fully functioning computer roughly the size of a wristwatch.

The computer, approximately one-inch square and a half-inch high, runs on a 206-megahertz Intel Corp. chip, giving it the processing speed of some powerful handheld models but with much more memory.

With a gigabyte of memory, the Irvine Sensors computer can store software applications such as word processors and spreadsheets and function just like a desktop or laptop model, said John Carson, the company's president.

At the moment, however, the system has no commercial uses.

The computer was developed for a government customer "that we really can't say too much about," Carson said. "Now we're looking for commercial applications of it.

"It's like planting a flag on the moon -- we want to be the first to have something like this," he added. "We invite systems developers to get in touch with us."

Irvine Sensors, which has 91 employees, was founded in 1980 and went public in 1982. Over the years, it has rarely been profitable. In its latest fiscal year, which ended last September, the company lost $6 million on revenue of $15 million. Much of the company's business comes from military contracts for computer and infrared-vision systems, some of which are used in spy satellites.

Observers said Irvine Sensors' wristwatch-size computer may be a technological breakthrough but wondered how marketable it is.

"This technology is definitely unique," said Goran Matijasevic, research coordinator at the Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility of the University of California, Irvine, who has kept track of Irvine Sensors for several years. "The question is, what is the need?"

"These guys have really been able to do a good job of squishing things down to a very small volume," said Vaughan Pratt, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who developed a slightly larger "matchbox" PC a few years ago.

However, keyboards and display monitors can only be shrunk so much before they become too small for human use. That's why "there was never a huge amount" of interest in the cubic-inch matchbox PC, said Pratt, who is also chairman of Palo Alto-based Tiqit Computers, which has developed a prototype for a handheld computer with a 300-megahertz processor.

Carson predicted that his company's system will be used in a commercial product -- possibly a powerful handheld personal digital assistant -- within a year to 18 months. The system could be upgraded with a faster processor and more memory, he said.

In its prototype form, the system includes interfaces for a mouse, keyboard, monitor and USB port. It runs on less than two watts of power, so it could be powered by a wristwatch-size battery and wouldn't get too hot for comfort if worn on the human body, Carson said.

The secret to the small size is the company's patented process for combining chips in stacks, which lets it put a lot of computing power in a small space. The computer's memory, for example, consists of 16 Samsung Flash memory chips in two stacks.

The system runs the Unix operating system, which is common in business computers, or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE, used in handheld PDAs. Its parts cost about $100, Carson said.

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To see more of The Orange County Register, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.ocregister.com

(c) 2003, The Orange County Register, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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