In another product postponement, semiconductor giant Intel Corp. said it won't be offering a chip for projection TVs by the end of 2004 as it had announced earlier this year.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker said Monday it still plans to introduce a liquid crystal on silicon chip, or LCoS, but company spokeswoman Laura Anderson declined to provide a specific timeline.

"Basically, we're evolving our product development plans," she said, adding the company wants to more clearly differentiate its product from competing technologies and provide a clearer television picture.

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.

Intel's plan to jump into the market was officially unveiled in January during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Analysts said the company's research and development dollars could make big-screen TVs cheaper and better - much like what it did for personal computers.

It's been a rough year for Intel products even though profits nearly doubled in the second quarter and it's on track to set record sales in the current quarter.

Its current Pentium 4, unveiled in February, has been criticized for not raising the performance bar over previous processors.

In May, it canceled the next-generation Pentium 4 so that it could focus on more promising technologies. In June, a manufacturing glitch forced a small recall of chipsets, which handle communications between the processor and the rest of the system.

In July, it said design problems would delay the release of a mobile computer chipset dubbed Alviso until next year. And it said better-than-expected performance in manufacturing of Pentium 4s resulted in an inventory buildup.

Also last month, Intel said its flagship Pentium 4 would not reach speeds of 4 gigahertz by the end of the year as it had earlier announced.

From Forbes