California and Italy are connected in many ways, sometime unexpected. These connections involve people, companies, and products. Thanks to a recent post by Leandro Agrò, I recently discovered a new and mostly unknown connection among the Japanese company Nintendo, Italy and California.
It all started in 1995. That year Benedetto Vigna, an Italian physicist, joined STMicroelectronics, an electronic company with headquarters in Geneva and an important presence in Italy, specifically in Sicily. A year later, Benedetto moved to California, UC Berkeley with the mission to study MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) and to build some experience with local electronic companies. After returning to Italy, Benedetto was put in charge of an ambitious project to build a new chip that could detect motion in three dimensions: a 3D accelerometer. The project succeeded and STM started to look for applications for the new product. The innovative chip, the size of a shirt button, is now used in several consumer products, from laptops to washing machines. But the most popular application for the new chip is the Nintendo Wii, where the 3axis-acellerometer is the key component in the remote controls which allows detecting the movement of the players.
For more details, I would recommend the interesting article recently published by the prestigious IEEE Spectrum magazine.
Franco Folini
P.S. (May 14, 2007): Thanks to a comment by Leandro Agrò (thanks again Leeander) I have to correct the post. STMicroelectronics wrongly stated that his microchip was a key component of the Wii remote control. The chip designed by Benedetto Vigna and his team is used only in the secondary, "nunchuk" controller. The main Wii remote features a chip made by Analog Devices Inc., of Norwood, Mass. Philip Ross, the author of the original Spectrum article, explain how he got it wrong. Interestingly and unfortunately, the original STMicroelctronics press release with the original announcement just disappeared from the company website.
