Zilog's Z8 Encore XP is highlighted as spokespeople for Zilog discuss the company's future design work in Shanghai, China. An announcement regarding the new center is likely to soon be made and will include news of Zilog's hiring of over a dozen designers to work more closely on defining future products and integrating present offerings with Zilogs China customers. James Thorburn, CEO of Zilog, notes that Zilog's most fertile market is the consumer market, which makes up half of the 8-bit market and will grow by almost $1 billion over the next four years, with most growth driven by China. Zilog recently went public and began moving in the direction of a fabless model. Zilog also is refocusing efforts from communications to the market for 8-bit controllers. The Z8 Encore XP family of flash microcontrollers will be highly competitive, since it will offer a development kit with a full ANSI C compiler for $39.95. Michael Gershowitz, VP of worldwide marketing for Zilog, says the Z8 Encore XP is for security, consumer, medical, and related embedded applications and runs at 10 million instructions per second. Analysts say Zilog may be able to get back some of its earlier sales strength, but faces strong competition in the microcontroller, and therefore increased risk. Zilog emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002 and has been profitable for the last 10 quarters. Competition in China is especially strong from 8-bit leader Microchip Technologies, a company six times the size of Zilog that obtains 40% of revenues from Asia.