What’s After NAND Flash?


By Mark LaPedus For years, many have predicted the end of flash memory scaling, particularly NAND, but the technology continues to defy the odds as it moves down the process curve. Still, there are signs that the floating gate structure in today’s flash memory is on its last legs. The floating gate is seeing an undesirable reduction in the control gate to capacitive coupling ratio. And ... » read more

Inflection Points


Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design talks with Paul Boudre, chief operating officer at Soitec, about FinFETs, industry inflection points, the end of life for planar transistors, bulk CMOS vs. SOI, the differences between fully depleted and partially depleted SOI, and the FD-SOI ecosystem. [youtube vid=8ZhfJLkImlk] » read more

Fabless-Foundry Model Under Stress


By Mark LaPedus The semiconductor roadmap was once a smooth and straightforward path, but chipmakers face a bumpy and challenging ride as they migrate to the 20nm node and beyond. Among the challenges seen on the horizon are the advent of 3D stacking, 450mm fabs, new transistor architectures, multi-patterning, and the questionable availability of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. ... » read more

What’s ST’s FD-SOI Technology All About?


As I blogged here on SemiMD last week, STMicroelectronics has announced that to supplement in-house production at their fab in Crolles, the company has tapped GlobalFoundries for high-volume production of 28nm then 20nm FD-SOI mobile devices.  ST will also open access to its FD-SOI technology to GlobalFoundries’ other customers.  High-volume manufacturing will kick off with ST-Ericsson’s ... » read more

Chenming Hu: SOI Can Empower New Transistors to 10nm and beyond


The following is a special guest post by Dr. Chenming Hu, TSMC Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley. He and his team published seminal papers on FinFETs (1999) and UTB-SOI (2000). This post first appeared as part of the Advanced Substrate News special edition on FD-SOI industrialization.  ~~ The good, old MOSFET is nearing its limits. Scaling issues and dopant-induced variations ... » read more

FinFETs And 3D ICs


Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design talks with Soitec's Steve Longoria about the role of FD-SOI in advanced semiconductor design and 3D stacks. [youtube vid=P7Ld14s9NY4] » read more

Soitec’s Wafer Roadmap for Fully Depleted Planar and 3D/FinFET


The following is a special guest post by Steve Longoria, Senior VP of Worldwide Business Development at Soitec.  It first appeared as part of the Advanced Substrate News special edition on FD-SOI industrialization. ~~ Today’s semiconductor industry is moving through several challenging transitions that are creating a significant opportunity for Soitec to bring incremental value to th... » read more

FD-SOI – Consortium Results (Part 2 of 3): Power and Performance


The results of the most recent SOI Consortium benchmarking study detail the interest of planar FD-SOI as early as the 28nm and 20nm technology nodes, in terms of performance, power and manufacturability. This 3-part blog series looks further at some of the implications. ~~ Fully depleted transistor architectures such as Planar FD-SOI, FinFETs (which is also a fully-depleted technolog... » read more

ST-Ericsson NovaThor This Year, 28nm FDSOI, Soitec Wafers


Big and official FD-SOI news: Soitec has announced that the company is supplying the FD-SOI wafers for ST-Ericsson’s next-generation of NovaThor 8540 smartphone/tablet processors. Starting at the 28nm node, this marks the industry’s first industrialization of the new planar, fully-depleted technology on ultra-thin SOI wafers. Soitec has just issued an official press release, but ST-Eri... » read more

FD-SOI Workshop ppts – STM’s 1st 28nm FD-SOI product line


The SOI Consortium’s 6th FD-SOI workshop, held just after ISSCC, yielded some exciting news. Most of the presentations are freely available for downloading from the SOI Consortium website. Here are the highlights. STMicroelectronics In a terrific presentation by Giorgio Cesana, Marketing Director at STMicroelectronics, he revealed that the company would be releasing a major product line b... » read more

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