SAN JOSE, Calif. — IBM Corp. has announced the availability of a 90-nm version of its floating-point unit (FPU) for its PowerPC processor line.

The product, dubbed the 440 Power Core Floating Point Unit, is designed to provide high-performance, low-power consumption for embedded applications in the PowerPC RISC processor line. This includes graphics generation for printing and medical imaging, pattern matching for data mining, and risk analysis for financial services.

"There is a significant demand for floating point performance in today's printing, imaging and data mining applications," said Ron Martino, director of PowerPC Products at IBM’s Microelectronics Group, in a statement.

IBM is also announcing availability of the certified design kit (CDK) for IBM's hard core version of the PowerPC 440 processor in 90-nm copper process technology. This CDK will enable clients to ensure that all specifications of a particular microprocessor design have been verified and certified on actual hardware, according to IBM.

The 440 Power Core Floating Point Unit will be available March 2006. The CDK is available this month.

IBM also announced that the U.S. Government's Trusted Access Program Office has licensed the fully synthesizable versions of IBM's PowerPC 405 and 440 processors.