American Semiconductor has announced the FleX-MCU™ product family. Leveraging an SOI starting wafer, the FleX-MCU is the world’s first physically flexible microcontroller fabricated using the FleX™ Silicon-on-Polymer™ process. The FleX-MCU is an 8-bit RISC microcontroller with 8KB embedded RAM operating up to 20MHz, and is the initial product for a full portfolio of physically flexible …

SOI and other advanced substrate based technologies will be significant beneficiaries of the European Commission’s “New European Industrial Strategy for Electronics”, targeting the mobilization of €100 billion in new private investments. In addition to the recently announced €360M FD-SOI Places2Be project (which stands for Pilot Lines for Advanced CMOS Enhanced by SOI in 2x nodes, …

The SOI Consortium’s FD-SOI Workshop is returning to Japan. This time it follows on the heels of the big 2013 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Kyoto. The VLSI Symposia run from June 10-14; the SOI Consortium’s workshop on fully-depleted SOI technologies follows on Saturday, June 15, at the Kyoto Research Park. The Consortium …

Targeting low-power SRAM for FD-SOI and FinFETs, UK physical IP start-up sureCore has received a £250K grant (about 292K Euros or $380.5K) from the Technology Strategy Board SMART. Working with the major foundries developing FD-SOI and FinFET technologies, the grant will be used in the development of a demonstrator chip to showcase sureCore’s patented array …

MOSIS, a provider of low-cost prototyping and small volume production services for custom ICs, has teamed up with ePIXfab, the European Silicon Photonics support center providing low-cost prototyping services for photonic ICs. The partnership gives MOSIS’ customers access to imec’s state-of-the-art fully integrated silicon photonics processes and Tyndall’s advanced silicon photonics packaging technology. Co-founded by …

The FD-SOI design and manufacturing ecosystem has just gotten a €360M boost. A new 3-year public-private project involving 500 engineers from 19 members in seven countries is looking to enable volume manufacturing in Europe from 28nm down to 10nm. The Places2Be project (which stands for Pilot Lines for Advanced CMOS Enhanced by SOI in 2x …

At the recent DATE Conference in Grenoble (DATE is like DAC, but in Europe, alternating yearly between Grenoble and Dresden), STMicroelectronics, CEA-Leti & Mentor Graphics joined forces for a FD-SOI presentation organized by CMP and sponsored by Mentor. Here are some of the highlights (the complete presentations are all available from the CMP website). FD-SOI: …

Fully-depleted transistor technologies, both planar and fin-type, are now in the mainstream for product designs. One of the many interesting topics in the new 3D FinFET technology is the approach to isolation. In this article, key elements that differentiate junction-isolated (bulk) and dielectric-isolated (SOI) FinFET transistors are discussed, encompassing aspects of process integration, device design, …

Hearing the news that GlobalFoundries would be offering two flavors of FD-SOI, ASN asked the company to explain the strategy further. Here are the responses provided by Subi Kengeri, Vice President of Advanced Technology Architecture. What do you see as the FD-SOI benefits for chip designers? Lower SRAM Vmin for retention and lower operating Vmin …

Specialty foundry Altis Semiconductor will be a foundry partner for the IBM 180nm SOI technology. ALTIS will deliver high volume products starting Q2 2013 and will secure capacity increase for 2014 and beyond to address the IBM forecasted demand.  This foundry agreement addresses the next generation of consumer products, including as an example, the RF/SOI …