IBM Corp significantly stepped up its efforts in the merchant semiconductor market late Monday when it announced that it is now sampling the PowerPC 601 RISC microprocessor, with production volumes shipping in the third quarter, and announced its entry into the application specific market with CMOS and BiCMOS process technologies and access to industry-standard ASIC design tools and new applications support services, aiming to deliver ASICs based on gate-array and standard-cell technologies for computer and other systems manufacturers. It released the 0.5-micron CMOS 5L process, which uses five metal wiring layers to achieve ASICs of up to 1.3m usable gates, and ASIC design kits supporting the tools from Cadence Design Systems Inc, Mentor Graphics Corp and Synopsys Inc. The PowerPC part is designed for use in low-end to mid-range desktop systems and costs $275 for the 50MHz version and $380 for the 66MHz version in quantities of 25,000 to 50,000. Other PowerPC products will include the PowerPC 603, targeted at laptop, portable and hand-held systems; the PowerPC 604, a high-performance processor aimed at servers and high-end desktop systems; and the PowerPC 620, a high-performance 64-bit microprocessor for workstations and servers. IBM Technology Products’ customers will also gain access to CMOS 4S and CMOS 4LP, two of IBM’s 0.8-micron processes.
