In fact, this is the title of a presentation given by Pete Foley during FD-SOI Forum 2014 held in Shanghai, a couple of weeks ago. What is nice with clever people like Pete Foley is that they get the point, and get it quickly. Getting the point is to insert AND in capital in the title, as using FD-SOI technology allows to benefit from low-power… Read More
Tag: fd-soi
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
High Tech Headwinds and Project/People Management
In previous posts, we discussed the growing set of challenges and threats faced by the semiconductor industry. From saturating & stagnant systems markets to the gears starting to seize up in that engine of growth we’ve been calling Moore’s Law, chip revenues are – with the exception of memory price boosts from supply… 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
Setting the Record Straight on FD-SOI Costs
I recently published an article on Semiwiki “Is SOI Really Less Expensive”. That article was the result of months of careful research and analysis. I looked at planar FDSOI versus bulk planar, bulk FinFETs and FinFETs on SOI at three different nodes. I took a consistent set of assumptions with respect to the fab used to run the processes,… Read More
Is SOI Really Less Expensive?
Introduction
There have been some claims made recently that planar Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) is less expensive than bulk planar processes and FinFETs at various nodes. Some of these claims suggest that FinFETs in particular are significantly more expensive. My company, IC Knowledge LLC produces the most widely… Read More
STM FD-SOI Manufacturing Double Source: Samsung
Let’s start with apologies: when guessing that SMIC would be the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] source foundry for ST-Microelectronics 28nm FD-SOI, I was wrong. To be honest, if I had made the assumption that Samsung was this double source, I would have generated dozen of comments, calling me “crazy blogger”…for the best. Announcing Samsung… Read More
Samsung Endorses FD-SOI!
This is probably one of the biggest stories we will cover this month, if not this year, absolutely. In partnership with STMicroelectronics, Samsung will manufacture 28nm FD-SOI chips for the fabless semiconductor community starting now. This proves without a shadow of a doubt that Samsung is serious about the foundry business.… Read More
FD-SOI : SMIC or…Who else?
In fact, as of today, nobody can refer to an official statement made by any STM executive about name of the foundry able to process FD-SOI wafers in 28nm. We just know that the agreement is about to (or has been) signed… But we may speculate, and try to use our rational thinking. For example, the Semiwiki readers had the opportunity to… Read More