The Ministry of Science and Technology announced yesterday that China has developed and marketed the country's first batch of powerful system chips that can be used in communication equipment and terminals.

Ma Songde, vice-minister of Science and Technology, said that the chip, known as the COMIP system chip, has been developed to break the monopoly on the Chinese telecommunications market held by a group of overseas companies. A high-performance embedded central processing unit and a digital signal processor have been integrated into the chip, which is capable of processing up to 500 million instructions per second.

The chip was developed by Datang Micro-electronic Technology Co. in cooperation with Zhejiang University and other institutions. The development was funded by the country's high-tech development and commercialization program run by the ministry.

The Chinese-made chip is said to be more power-efficient than similar foreign-manufactured products, and can be used in complete sets of communication equipment and terminals. The chip has been used in mobile phone sets, videophone sets and other consumer electronic goods launched by Datang.