Next week is the Mentor U2U Conference in Silicon Valley. By chance I had coffee with one of the U2U keynote speakers while we were waiting for the FD-SOI Symposium to start last week and can tell you this FREE event is one you don’t want to miss:… Read More
If you’re in the chip biz in Silicon Valley, check out the SOI Consortium FD-SOI Symposium on April 13th in San Jose. They’ve been running these things since 2009, and I have to say that this one is the most comprehensive to date. Headliners include Cisco, Sony, NXP, SigmaDesigns, ARM, Ciena plus the big FD-SOI foundries,… Read More
A little over a month into 2016 and we already have a raft of FD-SOI news from Samsung, GlobalFoundries, NXP/Freescale, Renesas and more. Quite a bit of it came out of the recent SOI Consortium forum in Tokyo. Many of the presentations are now available on the SOI Consortium website (click here to see what’s there) – but keep checking… Read More
For any invention, technical proof of concept or prototyping happens years ahead of the invention being infused into actual products. When we talk about 5nm chip manufacturing, a test chip was already prototyped in last October, thanks to Cadence and Imec. Details about this chip can be found in a blog at Semiwiki (link is given … Read More
I really enjoy ARM Techcon when it rolls around every year because it has such a wide range of topics and exhibits. You can find maker gadgets, IoT information, small boards for industrial control, software development kits, semiconductor IP vendors as well as the big EDA players and foundries. This year after perusing the exhibit… Read More
I have been silently watching STMicroelectronics pursuing FD-SOI technology since quite a few years. FinFET was anyway getting more attention in the semiconductor industry because of several factors involved. But from a technology as well as economic perspective there are many plus points with FD-SOI. I remember my debate,… Read More
GlobalFoundries has positioned FDSOI proposal -22FDX- to provide better performance and power dissipation than competitive FDSOI offers on 28nm node. The FDSOI licensing agreement between LETI and GlobalFoundries is only a couple of months old (July 2015), but the real work has started in Dresden as several engineers from … Read More
One of the main criticisms of the FDSOI technology has been that it is a one-node solution at best and is not scalable to the future. Such arguments are typically based on the “gate-length-scaling” assumptions which do not capture the past and current trends of the CMOS technology as I discussed in my earlier post. Back in the early… Read More
As I said yesterday, last week was the GSA Analog/Mixed-Signal working group completely dedicated to FD-SOI. ST went first and had a presentation that was a mixture of an introduction to FD-SOI that I have covered times that are too numerous to mention. Then they did a dive into analog and RF capabilities for FD-SOI that went very … Read More
Last week there was a meeting of the GSA Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) working group. It was completely focused on FD-SOI (I hate that name, especially since FinFET is also fully-depleted. I vote for BoxFETs.) It was a bases loaded meeting with presentations from ST Microelectronics (calling in from France close to midnight), Samsung… Read More
