Other analysts agree that trotting out a high-volume product will be a watershed for Noise Cancellation, but they remain skeptical until it happens.

Boeing's only other high-volume product, the 737, has a different kind of moisture barrier.

And without such a high-volume product as a "technology driver," American companies are now falling behind in other areas as well, many officials believe.

Winbond will design, manufacture and sell the chips for use in low-priced, high-volume products such as X terminals, printers and multimedia applications.

The sporty Crossfire, which will come out later this year, has received positive reaction, but it is not a high-volume product.

"The Eclipse used to be a high-volume product," he said.

In comparison with its Xeon family of server processors, Itanium has never been a high-volume product for Intel.

There have been persistent industry rumors of a struggle within Intel over how aggressively the company should push the Merced technology into high-volume products.

"Those are still not high-volume products within the portable media player category," Mr. Rubin said of the larger, feature-laden video players.

The communications and computing group will handle products that focus on application operations, and the standard products group will be concerned with high-volume products.