Toshiba has announced that it would join IBM, AMD, Samsung, Chartered, Infineon and Freescale in an alliance to cut design and development costs of producing system chips using 32-nanometer circuitry. The chips could be used in everything from memory, computers, graphics cards, set-top boxes to games consoles.

More transistors on a chip equals more processing power, but the move to smaller circuit sizes is becoming too expensive for a single manufacturer to undergo alone, and so the group has committed to collaborate on the project through 2010. Toshiba previously signed an agreement with NEC Electronics to jointly work on 32-nanometer technology. That alliance, however, would reportedly focus on ways to mass-produce the chips.