Sources said the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is widening its scope against Intel in the run-up to its anti-trust case which starts in February. According to the sources, FTC officials are calling a number of vendors and analysts with questions relating to other aspects of Intel's business activities. The case against Intel, set to start February 19th, rests on allegations it unfairly acted against Compaq, Digital and Integraph, after they took legal action concerning patents they held. There is currently a separate anti-trust case which Intergraph is making against Intel. But our sources claimed that Intel had talked to a number of other parties, including IBM, Motorola and Apple over the PowerPC platform. Intel refused to decline on the reports but adamantly maintains it does not have a monopoly in the chip market. AMD, Cyrix, Rise and IDT all make x.86 microprocessors which compete with Intel at some levels. Until recently, however, Intel could be seen to dominate the high end of the chip market, at the server and SMP level. Any FTC case against Intel could well be undermined by developments with the Alpha technology which have emerged over the last six months. ® Related Stories The FTC complaint against Intel