PlayStation Creator Courts Serious Fun
Mar 04, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- After nearly 25 years of
hard work that included a product flop, a failed alliance, and plenty
of grunt-level design engineering, Ken Kutaragi has become something of
a celebrity in Silicon Valley.
Semiconductor executives and reporters hang on the words of the man who
began his career as a rank-and-file engineer in Tokyo. They're eager to
find out what move he'll make next with his Sony PlayStation, the
video-game machine that has sold an extraordinary 50 million units
since it was launched in 1994, and those same industry watchers are now
waiting for a much-anticipated refresh.
"He's had more impact on my career than any other customer I've ever
known," said Brian Halla, CEO of National Semiconductor, who, as head
of the consumer division of LSI Logic, helped broker the deal that gave
LSI the design win for a chip set inside the original PlayStation.
"I tell him I have a piece of my home named the Kutaragi wing," Halla
said.
National Sees The Light Not only did the landmark design win give the
company's system-chip strategy a shot in the arm (along with its stock
price, which jumped from 4 7/8 to 126, largely on the strength of the
deal), but it also colored Halla's goals for National in the PC and
set-top world.
"Everything I am trying to do at National stemmed from the [PlayStation
project]," he said. As proof, Halla pointed to National's own
single-chip offering, the MediaPC, which it plans to roll out in June
for set-top boxes.
The silicon behind the next generation of video-game consoles is having
a similar impact on Toshiba, which has embarked on a new
media-processor design as well as a 128-bit embedded CPU family based
on its work for the next PlayStation processor.
"We learned a lot from this project," said Mitsuo Saito, general
manager of Toshiba's system ULSI engineering lab in Kawasaki, Japan.
But Kutaragi's work did not always generate such high-profile praise.
Long before he became chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America,
Kutaragi's first design efforts were as obscure as one could imagine --
developing dot-matrix LCDs and code for stripped-down controllers.
The 80-by-100 matrix LCD Kutaragi designed as a young engineer at Sony
never got off the ground. "It was too early," he said. But the
assemblers, debuggers, and compilers he helped write for proprietary 4-
and 8-bit Sony controllers was more of a success, albeit only inside
the walls of Sony's engineering labs.
Kutaragi describes those processors as something less ambitious than a
full-blown microcontroller, since they were streamlined and optimized
around specific Sony systems such as tape decks and videotape players.
The code itself ran on the CP/M operating system.
"There were no Microsoft tools," he said. "I realized it was important
to have integrated tools to help optimize those cores."
From that small success, Kutaragi went on to become one of a handful of
project leaders on Sony's analog Mavica camera. He helped develop a
2-inch floppy disk that the camera used for storage. It rotated at a
then-unheard-of 3,600 rotations per minute.
The microfloppy was used in the analog Mavica and a few word processors
of the day, but ultimately flopped as the 3.5-inch floppy became a
standard. Nevertheless, Kutaragi said he learned a great deal about
error correction coding and modulation techniques from the project.
Kutaragi found his calling one day when he bought one of the first
8-bit Nintendo NES video-game consoles while working at a Sony
information-systems research center, where he was one of about 100
digital engineers. "I was really impressed by this machine because it
was totally program-driven," he said. "The graphics were very
sophisticated if you compared it with one of the TI computers of that
time, but the sound was terrible. There was no frequency flexibility.
It was just one or zero. I was frustrated that such a nice machine had
such horrible sound."
Out of that frustration an opportunity was born that ultimately led
Kutaragi to his current spot as "the father" of the PlayStation.
Kutaragi and a Sony salesperson met with executives from Nintendo to
propose Sony apply its signal-processing prowess to Nintendo's
next-generation console. The two companies quickly struck a deal.
"We designed a small chip and made an offer to Nintendo, and they
picked it up in their 16-bit system, the Super NES, which offered PCM
audio," said Kutaragi. The work gave birth to a small team of about
five designers, including Masakazu Suzuoki, who later became the core
of the PlayStation team.
"We realized this was a nice growth area for us in digital
entertainment, and driven by the evolution in semiconductors -- Moore's
Law -- there would be a new level in entertainment," he said. Indeed,
emboldened by his success, Kutaragi made another proposal to Nintendo
in 1989: The two should work toward developing the first CD-ROM-based
console. A year later, Nintendo agreed and the two were off to the
races.
Beat Nintendo "But at Summer CES [Consumer Electronics Show] in 1991, I
had a surprise when Nintendo announced a realignment, and said they
would work with Philips on the console and stop our project," Kutaragi
recalled. "Our engineers had a good relationship [with theirs], but
management decided to go another way."
Ironically, the Nintendo/Philips console never got off the ground, but
the deal had an unintended effect. "We decided to start our own
[console] development, and we gathered up a team at Sony to create a
new gaming system to beat Nintendo," said Kutaragi.
Sony's ambitious goal in May 1992 was to create the first CD-ROM
console with real-time computer graphics powered by a
1-million-transistor system-on-a-chip. Kutaragi talked to every
semiconductor company that would accept a meeting to find a partner for
his plans. Some weren't interested, and others said it couldn't be
done. Ultimately, Halla seized the opportunity for LSI Logic and helped
deliver the MIPS-based chip.
"Almost every night for two-and-a-half years, we had conference calls
on the project, with Kutaragi in attendance at most of them, mainly to
go over engineering trade-offs," Halla said. "The rest of the meetings
were highly animated philosophical discussions about pricing."
For its part, Sony took on the challenge of creating its own RTOS
environment, libraries, and third-party tools for game-title
developers. Convincing title developers they should stop writing to
low-level hardware registers where performance advantages can be gained
and focus instead on delivering content quickly with the Sony libraries
and tools was a tough job -- one Microsoft still faces today with its
Windows DirectX APIs.
Ultimately, Sony was able to roll out the tools in early 1994 and ship
the console in Japan later that year. As many as 50 million PlayStation
consoles have been sold to date, and 2,000 titles are available for the
machine, Kutaragi said. Still, since 1996, he has moved on to work on
the PlayStation's successor.
At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in
February, Kutaragi's colleague Suzuoki described a 128-bit media
processor expected to form the silicon heart of that system. At 10
million transistors, the chip's integration is an order of magnitude
beyond that of the existing LSI Logic part.
Toshiba managers who worked on the project said they have learned
enough from their work to roll a new line of 128-bit embedded
processors for networking and a new media processor design of their
own. Earlier this week, Kutaragi rolled out details of two more pieces
of silicon inside the next PlayStation -- an ambitious graphics chip
Sony has designed and an I/O processor from LSI Logic that will ensure
the new machine is backward-compatible with the existing one.
The new DVD-based console, which Kutaragi said will hit the Japan
market in the coming winter, will not only attack competition from
Nintendo and Sega, but also will give the embattled home PC a run for
its sub-sub-$1,000 market. However, Kutaragi said the new system will
depend on Direct Rambus DRAM chips and 0.18-micron process technology,
neither of which will be in wide supply until 2000.
"My guess is they will position the PlayStation II as being more of an
information appliance," said Halla, who has staked his company on just
such a vision. "It has to access the Web."
The bold ambition behind the new design is generating plenty of
interest around Kutaragi and his Sony Computer Entertainment division.
After the ISSCC paper in February, LSI's CEO, Wilf Corrigan, strode
through the crowd of engineers to personally congratulate Kutaragi on
the new media processor design. And last year at the Microprocessor
Forum, keynoter Halla asked Kutaragi to stand up in the audience and
take a bow as a pioneer of the system-chip trend.
Just how the next round of video-game wars will turn out for Sony
remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Kutaragi plans to keep the
bar high and ride Moore's Law for all it's worth.
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