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TOKYO — NEC Corp. has begun volume production of the system-on-a-chip device it is making for GameCube, Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s next-generation gaming console, which is scheduled to hit the Japanese market in July and the U.S. market in October.
NEC said the new fab, featuring a 8,300-square-meter clean room and located at NEC's facilities on Kyushu, has a capacity of ten-thousand 8-inch wafers a month. Nintendo's decision to have a third party produce the chip — which integrates a graphics engine, sound generator and one-transistor embedded SRAM — contrasts with Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.'s decision to rely on internal production of the graphics processor for its Playstation 2 gaming system. Sony's difficulty in producing the graphics chip caused it to miss production goals for the Playstation 2.
NEC built the new facility based on its expectation that the total supply of the SoC, called Flipper, would amount to 300 billion yen (about $2.6 billion) for the life of GameCube. Construction began in December 1999 and test production started last August. The fab shifted to volume production in January, an NEC spokesman said.
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Nintendo did not invest in the new fabrication facility. Acting alone, NEC invested about $690 million in the new fab, which can produce multiple product lines. Initial production of the Flipper LSI will use a 0.18-micron process, but the line is capable of building chips in the 0.13-micron process that NEC developed for SoC devices.
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Nintendo's GameCube console is a small cube-shaped system with an 8-cm optical disk drive. Nintendo worked with IBM Corp. on the system's CPU, a customized version of a 405-MHz PowerPC, and with Matsushita on the disk system. ArtX Inc. supplied technology for the 3-D graphics engine, and Mosys Inc. provided the one-transistor SRAM technology embedded in Flipper.
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