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.
Steve: Cadence, IBM, ARM & other members of the SOI Consortium have a lot of excellent resources, including free online video & audio “design clinics”. Good summary w/links at http://www.advancedsubstratenews.com/2010/12/design-clinics-now-online/ .