A new IC Knowledge report examines the costs of potential solutions for a foundry at 22nm. What are you doing at 22nm? The debate is raging in the press and forums alike. Now research firm IC Knowledge has issued a report showing that from a straight cost perspective, planar FD-SOI is a better choice than …

Nintendo’s next high-profile, high-volume CPU will leverage IBM’s 45nm SOI  for performance, power and eDRAM. If you’ve followed the ASN “Buzz” in recent weeks, you’ve seen the news: the CPU for Nintendo’s upcoming (and very cool) Wii U is on 45nm SOI. IBM’s been fabbing chips for Nintendo for over a decade, and first moved …

ST’s latest BCD shows how SOI yet again enables huge reductions in power consumption. What if you had to reduce power dissipation by 40x? That’s exactly the task that fell to ST, under an EU program called Smart Power Management. At the recent ISPSD (International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs) conference, STMicroelectronics and …

Although Intel will do FinFETs at 22nm, FD-SOI remains the better alternative for most all the industry for low power and mobile apps. In the weeks and months to come, we’ll continue hearing  the SOI camp addressing key points. 1. FD-SOI technology is the most cost-effective solution. The wafers are available from multiple sources. With …

In the latest ASN posting by Dr. Eric Mounier of Yole Developpement, “SOI for MEMS: A Promising Material”, he notes that SOI MEMS is growing at a CAGR (2011-2015) of 15.6%, compared to 8.1% for bulk silicon-based solutions. MEMS designers are doing amazing things on SOI – which would explain that impressive growth rate. The …

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference – better known as ISSCC – is of course where the big guns show us their big advances at the chip level. At the most recent conference, held a few weeks ago in San Francisco, advances that leveraged SOI were once again at the forefront. As always, performance gains generate …

45nm SOI is a big part of the big news from the Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona last week. That’s because Freescale’s newly announced QorIQ Qonverge is the “base-station on a chip” in the Alcatel-Lucent lightRadio™ technology, which was the talk of the show. (See the video.) The Bell Labs guys came up with …

The other night, IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer beat the world’s two best players in the popular “Jeopardy” game show, in which the contestants are told the answer, but then have to figure out the right question.  In that spirit, here’s an ASN spin on the game: Category: semiconductor design & manufacturing. Answer: The starting substrate for …

Up to 80% additional performance improvement on an ARM Cortex M0. 40% lower power for SRAMs. These are the amazing planar FD-SOI results just announced by the SOI Consortium.  Things are suddenly looking much brighter in the world of low-power, high-performance chips for mobile and consumer apps. An A-list of companies collaborated on this assessment/characterization …

Of those receiving top awards at the IEDM last month, over half (!) are stars of the SOI community. Wow. I discovered this while putting together the new listing of SOI-based papers at IEDM (don’t miss the summaries & links now posted in ASN’s most recent PaperLinks). At the IEDM, the IEEE also awarded the …