In 1968, Soltis completed his
PhD in electrical engineering from
Iowa State University. His PhD dissertation was titled "Automatic Allocation of Digital Computer Storage Resources for Time-sharing". In November 1968, he took a position with IBM in
Rochester, Minnesota. Soltis led the design of the "Amazon"
instruction set architecture, an extended version of the
64-bit PowerPC architecture; the Amazon architecture is implemented by the
RS64,
POWER4, and
POWER5 processors used in the IBM iSeries and
pSeries computers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, in addition to his IBM responsibilities, Soltis served as an
adjunct professor of
electrical engineering at the
University of Minnesota where he taught graduate courses on high performance computer design. Soltis retired from IBM on December 31, 2008 after 40 years with the company. In February 2009, Vision Solutions announced that Soltis had joined their Technology Advisory Board. Soltis'
By Design column appears in iPro Developer magazine. His books include
Inside the AS/400 and
Fortress Rochester, The Inside Story of the IBM iSeries. ==Books==