By MATTHEW FORDAHL, AP Technology Writer
SAN JOSE, Calif. - In another change of plans, semiconductor giant Intel Corp. canceled a project Thursday to develop a chip for projection TVs and said it planned to focus its resources in other areas.
The company's plans to develop a liquid on crystal silicon chip, or LCoS, were first unveiled in January during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In August, Intel said it would not be released by the end of the year, as originally announced.
The cancellation came as the company was assessing its 2005 budget and analyzing its investment in the technology, said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman.
"We looked at the investment required, the returns and the timetable to get to those returns, and we decided it's better for us to focus our resources in other areas," he said.
LCoS competes against other new display technologies that have already invigorated the rear-projection TV market, most notably the digital light processing (DLP) chip pioneered by Texas Instruments Inc.
Analysts said Intel's move into the market could have made big-screen TVs less expensive much like what its microprocessors did for personal computers over the past 30 years.
In recent months, Intel has made a number of changes in its product plans, including the cancelation of a 4-gigahertz Pentium 4 that had been scheduled to ship early next year.
In May, it canceled work on a next-generation Pentium 4 so that it could focus on more promising technologies. In June, a manufacturing glitch forced a small recall of chip sets, which handle communications between the processor and the rest of the system.
Then, in July, the company said design problems would delay the release of mobile computer chip set dubbed Alviso until next year. And it said better-than-expected performance in manufacturing of Pentium 4s resulted in an inventory buildup.
Shares of Intel closed at $21.69, down 24 cents, in Thursday trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. In the extended session, they lost another 4 cents.
