What else can you do with IBM’s 45nm SOI process? More games, the Cell processor, and photonics

Last week, I wrote about IBM’s 45nm SOI process, which is now used in a variety of interesting applications such as the Jeopardy!-playing IBM Watson supercomputer, the soon-to-be-available Nintendo Wii U, and an experimental IBM brain simulator. I wondered what else might be using this interesting process technology so a bit of Google searching turned up these interesting applications for the 45nm SOI process:

For more fun and games, there’s the merged CPU/GPU in the Microsoft Xbox 360. 

And the improved version of the Cell processor in the Sony Playstation 3

Here are more links to descriptions of the 45nm SOI Cell processor:

IBM presents 45nm Cell B.E. at ISSCC

IBM PowerXCell™ 8i processor benefits

And finally, some really interesting experiments with on-chip photonics.

Incidentally, the impetus for writing about these applications was the recently published story of IBM’s work with Cadence to develop Spice-level models for the 45nm SOI process. This collaboration on SOI transistor models has been ongoing for more than 10 years.

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