SOI Consortium Aimed at Mobile Systems
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 10/9/2007 7:48:00 AM
The SOI Industry Consortium, announced Monday with 19 founding members, will take as a primary focus the low-power-consumption demands of consumer electronics systems ranging from “the box next to your TV to the box in your pocket,” said André-Jacques Auberton-Hervé, chairman of the consortium.
While silicon on insulator (SOI) technology got its start in high-performance microprocessors, the SOI consortium was formed largely to promote “the low-power aspects, which are key to consumer markets. We need to create the benchmarks using facts and realities,” said Auberton-Hervé, who is the CEO of SOI wafer manufacturer Soitec Group (Bernin, France).
Asked if some consumer electronics companies dismiss SOI as too costly, Auberton-Hervé said consumer system needs now triangulate on stringent demands for low-power, relatively high-performance and compact system size. “The end users don’t really care about the wafer costs. The cost of the wafer is clearly a question for Soitec with some IC makers. The cost effectiveness of the overall technology — whatever technology they look at, either bulk or SOI — is what the system makers look at. They care about the system, about the cost of cooling, packaging, designing and investing in new technology going from 65 to 45 nm.”
The SOI consortium will address the concerns of end users, including companies making ICs and systems for broadcast, entertainment and gaming, among others. “Cell phone manufacturers have energy at the center of their concerns. And those companies cannot ignore the environmental and cost aspects of energy consumption,” he said.
The SOI Industry Consortium grew out of interest in a collaboration, announced last October, between Soitec and ARM Ltd. (Cambridge, UK) to develop ICs for consumer and embedded markets. With other companies seeking to join the Soitec-ARM alliance, the larger consortium came to life, he said.
Major foundries are among the 19 founding members, he noted, with Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung Electronics, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) and UMC all joining, as well as IBM, one of the early adopters of SOI.
Although Soitec acted as a “catalyst” to establish the consortium, Auberton-Hervé said, “This is not a Soitec consortium. I’ve been elected as chairman, as one of the industry leaders, but this effort comes from the IC makers and the SOI ecosystem. Hopefully, Soitec can play an important part, but how the consortium develops is in the hands of the members.”
Membership ranges from full membership (with annual dues of $35,000 for companies with revenues of <$1B, and $50,000 per year for companies with >$1B), to $15,000 per year for technical members. Academic members can participate for free, but are “required to share any SOI-related published reports or papers with all members in lieu of dues.”
The founding membership roster, in addition to those already mentioned, includes AMD, ARM, Cadence Design Systems, CEA-Leti, Freescale Semiconductor, Innovative Silicon, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, NXP, Samsung, Semico, SEH Europe, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys.
