Industry Expert Blogs

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 and GlobalFoundries. That is 3 for 3 of companies that have announced FD-SOI manufacturing.

Here's the situation. ST got FD-SOI to the commercial manufacturing stage at 28nm. Others, notably IBM, did research in the area (IBM uses partially depleted SOI for its high-end servers, now manufactured by GlobalFoundries, which acquired IBM's semiconductor business). Samsung announced that they were licensing ST's process. However, until yesterday, I had not heard much about what the true status was.

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