The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative announced Thursday that it has signed an agreement with chipmaker Marvell to jointly develop the next generation of OLPC XO devices, the first of which will be a tablet set to debut next year.

As part of the deal, OLPC will also make its design and reference work available to Marvell and its partners in order to get its technology more widely adopted.

"We really just saw that Marvell was going in the right direction in terms of the capabilities and functions they were putting in their processors, [especially] low-power management," said Ed McNierney, chief technology officer at OLPC.

OLPC announced in December that it planned to introduce a tablet-based XO 3.0 device in 2012 for less than $100. McNierney said this week that Marvell's Moby platform – an education-based tablet prototype introduced in March – will help accelerate the production of the XO 3.0 by nearly two years.

PC Magazine