CPU Find of the Day… an Oasis of Semiconductors
Today I found my bosses old Dell All-In-One printer, kicked to the curb for operation that cannot be considered flawless. Yanked it apart wand what did we find? Alas a chip by Oasis (no sorry not the band) but Oasis Semiconductor, ironically with their URL marked on the chip:
OA-982 DigiColor2
Oasis? Never heard of them, so I did some research. Oasis was on the forefront of supplying IC’s for the then (late 1990’s) emerging market of All-in-One printers. The DigiColor2 has an ARM core, and a MCS-51 MCU at its heart, integrating nearly all of the functions to run a printer, scanner, copier and fax.
This turned out to be a great business, so much so that SigmaTel decided to buy them out for $57 million in 2005. SigmaTel of course famouse for being the main IC supplier for Apple iPods for many years (until the latest generation) SigmaTel itself has now been bought out by Freescale.
