IBM and ST To Develop SOCs Jointly
Staff -- Semiconductor International, 9/1/1998
I
BM (East Fishkill, N.Y.) and STMicroelectronics (St. Genis, France) announced
a joint effort to accelerate development of advanced system-on-chip
(SOC) products. The two companies have concluded agreements to exchange
intellectual property (IP) and develop integrated circuits jointly for
current and future data storage applications and PC-compatible
information appliances.
The IP necessary to address the applications areas identified by IBM and ST is varied and complex. It may include microprocessor and microcontroller cores, digital signal processors (DSPs), memory blocks, communications cores, sound and video cores and many of the other functions necessary for machine and human communications, such as high-speed serial interfaces.
IBM and ST have agreed to cooperate on the development of ICs for data
storage, with a particular focus on hard disk drives. Specifically, ST
will gain access to IBM's PowerPC technology, and IBM will gain access
to ST's hard drive DSP and CMOS read channel technologies. In addition,
using ST's approach of PC-on-a-chip and the common x86 microprocessor
core road map, both ST and IBM plan to market a family of
"computer-on-a-chip" products that will enable customers to build small,
very powerful, multi-function information appliances quickly. 
