This news in May 2014 that Samsung had licensed FD-SOI Technology from ST-Microelectronics was really amazing, as most of the industry was expecting this kind of agreement, but not with the #2 SC Company. But since May 2014 the news flow has been quite reduced, we can imagine that both SC companies had a lot work to do for transforming… Read More
IEDM: FD-SOI Down to 10nm
The big picture is that planar semiconductor transistors don’t really work below 20nm. The reason is that the gate does a poor job of controlling the channel since too much channel is too far from the gate and so there is a lot of leakage even when the transistor is nominally off. So the channel needs to be made thinner. One way … Read More
Which IP for FD-SOI Ecosystem?
We know that the best technology or product, even if it exhibits best in class and unmatched features, is almost of no use if lacking an ecosystem. If you think about a processor core, you will expect to find compatible communication bus and memories (inside the SoC) and operating system, compiler, debugger, etc. When dealing with… Read More
FD-SOI, an Opportunity for China?
Last month in Shanghai was a meeting of the FD-SOI consortium. The focus of the meeting was largely on the suitability of using FD-SOI to serve the Chinese market. The fabs in China are not right on the bleeding edge and are very cost-sensitive so 28nm is probably as advanced as they will get for a long time if not indefinitely. China … Read More
A couple of misconceptions about FD-SOI
We have extensively discussed in Semiwiki about FD-SOI technology, explaining the main advantages (Faster, Cooler, Simpler), sometimes leading to very deep technical discussions, thanks to Semiwiki readers and their posts. I have recently found an article “Samsung & ST Team Up on 28nm FD-SOI”. This article includes many… Read More
FD-SOI at 14nm
At the recent Semicon West, Michel Haond of ST Microelectronics had a presentation on 14nm FD-SOI, or what they more lengthily call UTBB FD-SOI (which when you expand it all out comes to Ultra Thin Body and Buried-Oxide Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator). When Chenming Hu (or whoever in his group) came up with the term FinFET it … Read More
When TSMC advocates FD-SOI…
I found a patent recently (May,14 2013) granted to TSMC “Planar Compatible FDSOI Design Architecture”, the following sentences, directly extracted from this patent, advertise FDSOI design better than a commercial promotion! “Devices formed on SOI substrates offer many advantages over their bulk counterparts, including… Read More
FDSOI Target Applications Are…
Not PC segment, not necessarily Application Processor for Mobile, despite the power efficiency advantage versus a bulk technology. After several weeks filled by very animated and controversial discussion about FD-SOI cost, thanks to Semiwiki bloggers and readers, it seems interesting to elevate the debate and try to figure… Read More
FD-SOI: 20nm Performance at 28nm Cost
There has been a lot of controversy about whether FD-SOI is or is not cheaper to manufacture than FinFET. Since right now FinFET is a 16nm process (22nm for Intel) and FD-SOI is, for now, a 28nm process it is not entirely clear how useful a comparison this is. Scotten Jones has very detailed process cost modeling software (that is what… Read More
Keywords: FD-SOI, Cost, FinFET
How to synthesize a pretty good article Is SOI Really Less Expensive, and even more important the impressive amount of comments (56) generated? Let’s start with the initial article. Pretty good, but slightly biased, when you carefully dissect it, like I did in one of the comments (you can find it in-extenso at the end of this post).… Read More