To paraphrase the song, “What a difference a day would make.”  Searching to plug into the nearest power strip each afternoon, active smartphone users would certainly agree with that. But ST-Ericsson’s next-gen NovaThor chips on 28nm FD-SOI (available for design now), which are looking to get an extra day out of your battery, should put …

STMicroelectronics recently issued a major white paper detailing the choice of FD-SOI for consumer SOCs at 28nm and beyond. This article excerpts some of the highlights. From “Planar Fully-Depleted Silicon Technology to Design Competitive SOC at 28nm and Beyond” (White paper by STMicroelectronics and Soitec): “ FD-SOI Executive Summary Planar FD is a promising technology …

ST-Ericsson’s Chief Chip Architect Louis Tannyeres talks with ASN about the move to 28nm FD-SOI for smartphones and tablet SOCs.   Advanced Substrate News (ASN): Can you give us a bit of background on the markets you’re addressing? Louis Tannyeres (LT): Founded in 2009, ST-Ericsson is an industry leader in design, development and creation of …

A radical SOI-based approach puts  SiTime at the top of the fast-growing silicon-based timing market. SiTime, an analog semiconductor company, is revolutionizing the timing components industry with silicon MEMS timing solutions that replace legacy quartz products. SiTime offers oscillators (XO, SPXO), voltage-controlled oscillators (VCXO), temperature compensated oscillators (TCXO), and multi-PLL, multi-output clock generators. All these …

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-Ericsson …

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 …

STMicroelectronics predicts its new SOI-based STOD13AS power chip could be used in nearly every new smartphone or small electronic device that has an AMOLED display. ST, which already supplies over 80% of the market for these ultra-thin, vivid displays, says SOI ensures outstanding energy efficiency for longer battery life, and high immunity to noise for …

Imec and Genalyte have successfully developed and produced a set of disposable SOI-photonics biosensor chips for Genalyte‘s diagnostic and molecular detection equipment. Founded by SOI-photonics innovator Dr. Cary Gunn, Genalyte chips contain ring resonator sensors for very sensitive molecular detection; on-chip grating couples infrared light to diagnostic equipment.

Skyworks credits part of its Q1 FY12 success to having commenced volume production of advanced SOI-based Antenna Switch Modules (ASMs) for Huawei. With ongoing development of advanced switching solutions for handsets, data cards, and other applications, Skyworks cites the SKY18108 as one example of their recent ASMs tailored to meet the needs and requirements of …

At CES 2012, NXP unveiled its ultra-compact, high-precision SOI-MEMS-based frequency synthesizer as an alternative to quartz crystal-based timing devices. These timing devices target communications equipment using Gigabit Ethernet, USB, PCI-Express and S-ATA, plus CPU timing, memory and control in consumer electronics devices.