By Ina Fried
Wednesday, November 12 2008 10:40 AM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,62048183,00.htm

There is very little room inside a PC these days, both literally and figuratively.

Tiny Netbooks leave little physical space for any added components, while price competition means it is just as hard financially to convince PC makers that they need something extra.

However, that's what Safi Qureshey, who co-founded PC maker AST Research almost three decades ago, is trying to do.

His startup, Quartics, is pitching a chip that would augment the PC's main processor and graphics card with a programmable chip for handling Flash movies and videoconferencing, for example.

"It's a co-processor. It does not replace anything," Qureshey said in an interview at last week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles. Quartics' main targets, he said, are Netbooks and cheap laptops that do not have a lot of horsepower to spare.

"We significantly enhance the video quality of a very low-cost laptop and we enhance battery life," Qureshey said in an interview.

The company has been trying to get off the ground for a while, having started in 2003. Quartics has a number of venture backers and but has not publicly announced any PC-maker customers.

"We are working very closely with one. We just don't want to preannounce their name," he said.

Quartics' chips are being manufactured in sample quantities, Qureshey said, with production volumes planned for the first quarter of next year.

The advent of Netbooks makes Qureshey hopeful that such chips are now poised to take off.

Cost will be a key factor. Qureshey said the company hopes to get the volume price of its chip "in the teens" of dollars as opposed to the "twenties" where it is today. Some of that cost, he said, can be offset by using a cheaper main processor or graphics chip, he said.

Microsoft showed off a sample of Quartics' chip in one of its booths at WinHEC.

This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.