Moving Toward an SOI Ecosystem

The advanced substrate community has made terrific strides toward reaping the performance and power benefits associated with silicon on insulator (SOI) with the widespread deployment of this enabling technology around the globe. The current model of ad hoc collaboration — supplier-to-client, partner-to-partner and manufacturer-to-customer — has been instrumental in SOI's continued adoption in mainstream applications, such as personal computers, servers, game systems and numerous other types of consumer electronic devices, as well as mobile applications.

To this end, each company or interest group has taken responsibility for its own R&D efforts. Reasonably enough, this has been the domain of those with high-end products and long-term vision. And, as a result, they are producing chips that are faster; more power efficient; extremely reliable; and lastly, are more cost-efficient to both produce and use. Equally important to note is the fact that as SOI deployment has increased, costs have subsequently come down.

In fact, the performance and cost advantages have become so compelling that the next chapter in the SOI story is now unfolding — one where the advantages of SOI are brought to a much wider community.

Like so many past advances in the semiconductor industry, this transition is being driven by critical needs. Across different markets, manufacturers have common interests that are addressed by SOI. The high-performance markets are focused on further curbing power consumption, while the low- and ultralow-power markets seek to pump up the speed. In the "More than Moore" world of high-voltage, photonics, MEMS, photovoltaics, system-on-a-chip (SoC), sensors, optoelectronics and more, leveraging substrate innovation provides both increased functionality and cost efficiency.

At each step in the value chain, SOI further increases functionality and decreases costs.

From the circuit design to engineered starting substrate, from wafer manufacturing to chip packaging, from board layout to the cooling system, and from the final system integration to the end user — SOI has a positive impact. The players at each of these levels can help contribute to its proliferation for the mutual benefit of one and all. And, of course, greater adoption spurs lower costs through improved economies of scale, thereby driving even more adoption.

Widespread SOI adoption and the expansion of a true ecosystem might have been only intelligent speculation not so long ago, but it is now clear that it is fast becoming a reality. Last year's announcement that ARM (Cambridge, UK) had joined the SOI ecosystem with the acquisition of the physical IP-based on SOI technology company, Soisic (Grenoble, France). Whether their business model is full-custom or ASIC, fab/fabless or fab-lite, everyone stands to gain from this development. While those in the full custom-chip design and manufacturing business have developed enormous expertise, they — like their confreres in the ASIC world — need easy access to reliable physical IP.

In another important sign of the expanding SOI ecosystem, UMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan) announced that it has become the first foundry to develop and offer a complete 65 nm SOI solution. This represents a major step toward mainstream adoption in the fabless and fab-lite communities of nanometer SOI technology for improved speed and power in complex SoCs. Encouraging such adoption is the reported advantages of the design enabled by the UMC SOI process — up to 20% in area and 30% in power consumption. In addition, IBM (East Fishkill, N.Y.) recently rolled out its initial ASIC offering based on 45 nm technology, which is the world's first ASIC that combines embedded DRAM and SOI technologies. The SOI technology used for IBM's new chip provides up to a 30% performance boost.

Along with performance advantages, the cost benefits and ultimately the total productivity benefits associated with SOI are encouraging mass adoption by today's chipmakers. Announcements like these from ARM, UMC and IBM all highlight the strong industry momentum around SOI. However, while SOI enables critical benefits, this by itself is not enough to guarantee adoption across the industry. The key to enabling an SOI future and seeing its benefits realized throughout the greater semiconductor industry is for companies to work together.

Driven by enlightened self-interest, the greater advanced substrates community is doing exactly that. Finding common ground in terms of technological and business infrastructure is already driving cooperation and, by extension, further proliferation of SOI. Innovation may start at the substrate level, yet it is by federating industry efforts that the greater SOI and advanced substrates communities are creating a strong foundation on which to build the industry's engineered materials futures. It is a future that looks set to see a lot more SOI.