Microsoft and IBM moved the CPU and the GPU of the best-selling game console in North America onto a single SoC – a year ahead of the pack. There’s a lot of excitement about the “latest trend” of integrating both the computing chip – the CPU and the graphics chip – the GPU – into …

The PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 CPU design teams all chose SOI. Here’s why. Design challenges (Read the Cell overview paper by Kahle et al on the IBM website) Achieve 100 times the PlayStation®2 performance. Joint developers IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba needed to co-optimize the chip area, design frequency, and product operating voltage, creating …

Chartered is the industry’s first pure-play foundry to expand into high-volume SOI production. High-volume SOI at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing is a great success. January 2007 marks the three-year anniversary of the initial announcement that we would manufacture 90nm SOI products for IBM in volume-driven, high-performance solutions. Since we ramped production in mid-2005, we have shipped …

• Two important SOI-related announcements from Chartered. It is licensing IBM ’s 90 nm SOI technology, enabling it to expand the use of the technology to areas such as consumer, multi-media, communications, automotive and industrial applications for foundry customers. And, following the successful manufacturing of 90 nm SOI CPU products for the Xbox 360, Chartered …

• Nintendo has announced that the CPU of its new Wii® game console is based on a PowerPC (code-named “Broadway”) made with a 90 nm SOI CMOS process, jointly developed with and manufactured by IBM. The design was optimized with state-of-theart processing technologies that minimize power consumption and keep the console compact. The confirmation of …

Freescale’s Leo Mathew was chosen for his novel transistor structure. IBM & Microsoft Design Teams win for Xbox 360™ Leo Mathew, a principal solid state engineer at Freescale Semiconductor, was named Innovator of the Year at the EE Times Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) awards ceremony, for his invention of a novel transistor structure. His …

The widening availability of tools and services is good news for designers in the fabless/foundry arena considering the move to SOI. Leading foundries have made the investments in manufacturing on SOI. Those that have taken the final steps – finalizing electrical characterization, constructing SPICE models, integrating design tools and building libraries – are winning business. …

Microsoft’s custom PowerPC chip by IBM is based on SOI   Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which is expected to fly out of the stores this holiday season, has some very impressive figures to cite. The three-core PowerPC-based CPU, custom-made for Microsoft by IBM, boasts one teraflop of floating-point performance.

• Following the premier of its Xbox 360 TM video game and entertainment system, Microsoft confirmed that the unit is built around an IBM PowerPC-based CPU with three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each. The latest IBM PowerPC process technology integrates strained silicon and SOI. The new xBox will hit the stores in time …