Industry Expert Blogs

When I first heard about a foundry possibly licensing FD-SOI I would have bet it was SMIC in China. What better market for a low cost, low power, easy to manufacture alternative to FinFETs? The foundry of course was Samsung which also made complete sense since they have 28nm gate-first capacity that matches up nicely to 28nm FD-SOI. Same thing goes for GlobalFoundries and the Dresden Fab with gate-first 28nm capacity ready to be converted to 22nm FD-SOI.

Instead of taking the short road to FD-SOI, SMIC will take the long road to 14nm FinFETs and in my opinion they will fail miserably yet again. Seriously, how competitive will a first generation 14nm FinFET process be in 2020? Remember, third generation FinFETs will hit the new Nanjing TSMC fab in 2018.

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