Sony-Toshiba PlayStation II CPU chip moving down to 0.175 micron
By Jack Robertson
Electronic Buyers' News
(12/02/99, 11:40 a.m. EDT)
Tokyo -- Plans call for the Sony PlayStation II CPU chip to quickly move to 0.175-micron processing and be coupled with copper interconnect, a Sony official told the SEMI Semicon Japan show here yesterday.
Ken Kutaragi, president of the Sony Computer Entertainment division and father of PlayStation II, said the initial 128-bit MIPS-based CPU, called the Emotion Processor, will use 0.25-micron design rules to put 13.5 million transistors on-chip, plus embedded L1 cache SRAM. The CPU is jointly developed by Sony and Toshiba Corp. and produced at Toshiba's fab in Oita, Japan.
Kutaragi said that even before the first PlayStation II game machines come to market in March 2000, Sony and Toshiba will transition the CPU line to 0.175-micron processing. At the same time, as part of a $450 million R&D upgrade, the two companies plan to add copper to form some of the chip's four-layer interconnects.
Sony alone makes the graphics-synthesizer chip for the new game console. The chip has 4 Mbytes of embedded SDRAM, but also connects to external dual-channel Direct Rambus DRAM with 3.2-Gbit/s bandwidth. Kutaragi claims that is 10 times faster than any graphics accelerator currently on the market. The next iteration of the graphics synthesizer could embed flash memory as well, he added.
PlayStation II can use both CD-ROM and DVD disks, initially with each disk being read by a separate laser. However, Sony is developing a monolithic dual-frequency laser that can read both CD-ROM and DVD formats, according to Kutaragi.
Sony expects the Toshiba Oita fab to initially produce Emotion CPUs at the rate of 10,000 8-in. wafers a month. That will ramp up to about 60,000 wafers a month in 2003-2004, he said. |
