Peter,
Thanks for the news, not yet posted.......I guess you caught Moonray sleeping. <g>
Can't resist highlighting some stuff...
>>Chiaki Terada, president of LSI Logic K.K., said the company's two fabs here have reached a level of sophistication that other companies in Japan can only talk about.
"Our Japanese fabs have 9,000 wafer starts a week, producing far more SOC dice than anyone else here," Terada said. "Our devices are far more complex, with four layers of metallization interconnect, and will soon go to six layers. Japanese competitors are still mostly at three layers of metallization."<< :)
Sony PlayStation mentioned <zzzzzzzz>>>LSI even beat out competitors in Japan to supply Sony Corp.'s Play Station with a single-chip MIPS R3000 MPU core integrated with a graphics controller and video decoder. Sources said a yet-to-be-announced, next-generation Sony game player will use chips manufactured by both LSI Logic and Toshiba Corp.<<
Then the usual.......
>>"Many people are struggling to integrate a wide variety of cores on a single chip," Terada said. "A lot of companies talk about achieving this level of integration. But the reality is, they are having a great deal of difficulty producing very complex system-on-a-chip [devices]."
Terada said the greater number of metallization layers is crucial in SOC designs to connect the wide number of on-chip logic cores. He added that LSI's long experience as an ASIC and logic-IC manufacturer lend it an advantage over DRAM suppliers, which use fewer metallization layers in their memory chips.
"Traditionally, DRAM producers have needed only two layers of metallization, and they are trying to learn how to upgrade to increase the number of layers," he said.<<
Hope we get a continued move into semis tomorrow!
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