EE Times UK - Makimoto links IC future to next-generation robots: "The Sony advisor described the IC content of two well-known entertainment robots, the AIBO pet and the SDR, or Sony Dream Robot. AIBO, the dog-like device, is driven by a single 64-bit RISC CPU with 32 megaytes of memory, Makimoto said. Dedicated interface chips serve an array of sensors, motors and actuators that articulate the device and give it vision and speech. robotics promoises to be the next wave of massive investment and consumption for the electronics industry, following the successive waves of analog electronics, PCs and digital consumer and networking products, Makimoto argued. In effect, the IC industry's next big thing.

But the SDR, a 6-kilogram human-like robot, is a device of another order, he said. SDR, which has impressive abilities at image recognition, bipedal motion, grasping and articulating its limbs, relies on a central processing cluster of three 64-bit RISC chips and a total of 192 megabytes of DRAM. The computing cluster is supported by 29 16-bit microcontrollers, 23 DSP chips, four ASICs, three FPGAs and 16 megaytes of flaish memory.
Most of the resources serve SDR's array of sensors, actuators and motors. The most recent version of the device has 38 joints and 67 sensors, including an array of thermal sensors and pinch detectors. Vision comes from two color CCD cameras. Hearing, which can localize sounds accurately while providing speech recognition, comes from six microphones"