NEC has commenced sales of its new PC98-NX series of PCs, adopting the "PC97/PC98 System Design" guidelines proposed by Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation as the global standard for the next generation of PCs.
This new series offers heightened user friendliness through such features as quicker booting and simplified interfacing with peripheral devices, in addition to a faster processing capability for large volumes of multimedia data in network environments.
With this new line of products, NEC will continue to bolster and expand its PC business.
NEC is already firmly established as Russia's leading supplier of communications systems. Aiming to further build on this success, NEC has joined with Joint-Stock Company Telecominvest, of St. Petersburg, Russia, and Mitsui & Co., Ltd., and Sumitomo Corporation, of Japan, to establish NEC Neva Communications Systems.
This joint venture, representing the first between Japanese and Russian interests in the high-tech field, manufactures and sells NEC's leading-edge NEAX61 digital switching systems and intends to expand business throughout Russia and its neighboring countries.
NEC has developed a reflective thin-film transistor (TFT)
color LCD that does not use a backlight unit and is capable of displaying 4,096 colors with a wide viewing angle. This new LCD features low power consumption by employing light from the surrounding environment. Reflective TFT color LCDs are expected to enable the creation of thinner and lighter notebook PCs and personal digital assistants (PDAs) that offer greater energy efficiency.
Furthermore, reflective
TFT color LCDs have the ability to display high contrast and picture quality even in bright outdoor environments.
NEC and a Chinese partner company established a semiconductor production joint venture in Shanghai. The venture will support one of China's most important government projects, the goal of which is to quickly expand domestic production capacity to meet the country's soaring demand for semiconductors. NEC was selected for this joint venture because of its proven track record in semiconductor production at its plant in Beijing as well as its highly advanced semiconductor technologies.
The new company will have a production capacity of 20,000 eight-inch wafers per month and will design, manufacture, and sell memories and logic ICs with leading-edge 0.35-micron processing technology, making it China's largest semiconductor fabrication line.
NEC's Express5800 series is already Japan's best-selling line of PC servers. To further advance its position in the server market worldwide, NEC agreed to form a comprehensive alliance with Microsoft Corporation relating to server technologies for business applications.
A goal of this alliance is to develop highly reliable, high-performance servers that are extensible and capable of supporting large-scale mission-critical operations by combining NEC's technological expertise in mainframes and servers with Microsoft's Windows NT(R) server software. In addition, this alliance will develop next-generation network server hardware and software that support Internet and intranet applications for small and medium-sized companies.
