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Semiconductor History | Toshiba Oita — Emotion Engine Turns a Console Into a Fab Partnership
· 1999-6
Personal memoryBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Semiconductor History | Toshiba Oita — Emotion Engine Turns a Console Into a Fab Partnership
kevin
6/1/1999
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Oita TS Semiconductor Corporation began on June 1, 1999 as a Toshiba–Sony Computer Entertainment manufacturing joint venture. Inside Toshiba’s Oita Operations, it installed an eight-inch wafer line for the Emotion Engine, the processor at the center of Sony’s next PlayStation.
The design joined a 128-bit RISC core to multimedia hardware for geometry and physical simulation. Toshiba’s 2000 technology review reported 6.2 billion floating-point operations per second, while the production plan targeted 0.18-to-0.15-micrometre processing and 10,000 wafer starts a month.
The good was co-design carried all the way into manufacturing. Sony brought a huge console application and equipment investment; Toshiba brought system-LSI process knowledge and an operating cleanroom.
Their dedicated line let software ambitions, processor architecture, and process technology advance together instead of treating the chip as an interchangeable purchase.
The bad was the same dedication. A line optimized around one console generation concentrated capital, yield work, and demand risk in a single platform, and its ownership needed renegotiation when that cycle matured.
Sony and Toshiba agreed in 2007 to end the Oita joint venture when its contract expired in March 2008, with Toshiba buying Sony’s equipment assets there.
That ending did not make the chip a failure; it exposed the difference between a successful product and a permanent manufacturing structure. The Emotion Engine helped give PlayStation 2 a distinctive programmable machine, but the factory partnership was useful for a season, then the companies separated the assets and moved their semiconductor strategies elsewhere.
The pin marks the verified Oita semiconductor campus, now a Sony manufacturing base, not the exact room that held the 1999 eight-inch line. The cover shows a genuine Sony Computer Entertainment CXD9708GB Emotion Engine mounted on a PlayStation 2 board.
Sources: Toshiba and Sony joint-venture announcement of March 4, 1999; Toshiba Annual Report 2000 and Science and Technology Highlights 2000; Sony Annual Report 1999; Sony and Toshiba’s October 18, 2007 manufacturing-restructuring announcement; current Sony Semiconductor operations map.
Photo: “Emotion Engine (7583201712),” Dilshan Jayakody, CC BY-SA 2.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emotion_Engine_(7583201712).jpg
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