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Harris Semiconductor Announces Complete Power Management Solution to Support the Device Bay Specification

— High level of integration reduces total cost for OEMs
— Products to be exhibited during Comdex at Compaq booth

LAS VEGAS, NV, COMDEX, November 17, 1998 – Harris Corporation today announced a complete power management solution supporting the Device Bay specification. A new portfolio of digital and power controllers from Harris’ Semiconductor Sector, Melbourne, Fla., allows manufacturers to reduce overall cost and product time-to-market by providing the world’s most highly-integrated solution optimized for Device Bay product development.

"Harris’ development of the industry’s first power management devices for Device Bay underscores its support for this initiative," said Mike Coletta, product marketing manager at Harris. "We applaud the efforts of this consortium to make PC ownership better and we’re confident that Device Bay will make it easier to upgrade and service PCs, thus decreasing the total cost of ownership and improving ease-of-use among customers."

Device Bay is an industry consortium led by Intel, Compaq and Microsoft that defines a universal slot ("Bay") for installing interchangeable peripherals ("Devices"), such as hard disk drives, modems, CD and DVD drives, network cards and a variety of other electronics devices. The technology is being developed in response to customers’ desires to easily upgrade and customize their PCs and peripherals. With Device Bay, a customer would be able to insert a peripheral like a DVD drive directly into a PC without opening, rebooting or turning off a PC.

Harris’ technology delivers on the power management requirements for the Device Bay specification. It provides the necessary circuitry for uninterruptible power control between the peripheral device and the PC motherboard, and is fully compliant with Device Bay specification 0.85. It consists of an ACPI-compliant controller that interfaces with the motherboard of the host system, external N-channel MOSFETs that switch power supplies in the bay and a hot-swap power IC that regulates power control from the peripheral.

Harris Corporation's Semiconductor sector manufactures discrete semiconductors and integrated circuits. Product development efforts are focused on innovative "next level solutions" for the communications and power markets. The company’s broad portfolio of products serve many market segments – automotive, industrial, PC computing, wireless networking, signal processing, telecommunications, PC multimedia, consumer electronics, defense and space. The worldwide website is http://www.semi.harris.com.

Harris Corporation, with worldwide sales of more than $3.9 billion, is an international communications and electronics company that provides a wide range of products and services such as wireless and personal communications, digital television (HDTV), health care information, automotive electronics, transportation, business information, defense communications and information and Lanier office products.