So you’ve got questions about FD-SOI? For chip designers in Silicon Valley, there’s a great opportunity to get answers from some of the world’s leading design experts. It’s coming up fast: April 14th, the SOI Consortium is organizing a full day of FDSOI tutorials for chip designers. Bear in mind that … Read More
Intel Manufacturing Day: Nodes must die, but Moore’s Law lives!
Yesterday I attended Intel’s manufacturing day. This was the first manufacturing day Intel has held in three years and according to Intel their most in depth ever.
Nodes must die
I have written several articles comparing process technologies across the leading-edge logic producers – GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Intel, Samsung… Read More
CEO Interview: Amit Gupta of Solido Design
Solido Design Automation is rapidly making a name for itself in EDA. Amit Gupta is founder and CEO of Solido Design Automation, based in Saskatoon, Canada. You should also know that Solido is one of the founding members of SemiWiki.com. In the last six years we have published 44 Solido related blogs that have racked up more than 200,000… Read More
GlobalFoundries Makes Pure-Play Foundry Great Again!
The pure-play foundry business just got stronger and so did semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. As we all know, the fabless semiconductor industry started by utilizing extra capacity from traditional semiconductor manufacturers (IDMs). However, putting your designs in the hands of a competitor is not a good … Read More
ISS Gary Patton Keynote: FD-SOI, FinFETS, and Beyond!
Two weeks ago the SEMI ISS Conference was held at Half Moon Bay in California. On the opening day of the conference Gary Patton CTO of GLOBALFOUNDRIES gave the keynote address and I also had the chance to sit down with Gary for an interview the next day.
It’s All About the Models
The world-renowned statistician, Professor George Box, said, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” — that quote was the theme for one of the technical talks at the recent MOS-AK Workshop, held at UC-Berkeley. … Read More
IEDM 2016 – Marie Semeria LETI Interview
Marie Semeria is the CEO of Leti, one of the world’s premier research organization for semiconductor technology and the key development center for FDSOI. I first interviewed Marie at SEMICON West and at IEDM I had a chance to sit down with her and get an update on Leti’s efforts over the last several months.
My interview… Read More
IEDM 2016 – GLOBALFOUNDRIES 22FDX Update
At IEDM in 2015 I had a chance to sit down with Subramani (Subi) Kengeri and get a briefing on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 22FDX technology. At IEDM 2016 Rick Carter of GLOBALFOUNDRIES presented a paper on 22FDX. Following Rick’s presentation, I had a chance to sit down with Rick and John Pellerin, VP of Technology and Integration and … Read More
Always-On IoT – FDSOI’s Always Better? What About Wafers? (Questions from Shanghai)
Mahesh Tirupattur, EVP at low-power SERDES pioneer Analog Bits lead off the panel discussion at the recent FD-SOI Forum in Shanghai with the assertion that for anything “always on” in IoT, FD-SOI’s always better. They had a great experience porting their SERDES IP to 28nm FD-SOI (which they detailed last spring – see the ppt here… Read More
Soitec – Enabling the FDSOI Revolution
Recently I published two blogs on Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) and the potential the technology shows for a variety of low power and wireless applications. In order to produce FDSOI devices, the device layer has to be thin enough to ensure the device is fully depleted and ideally the buried oxide has to be thin enough… Read More

