The 38th annual SOI Conference is coming up in just a few weeks. Sponsored by IEEE Electron Devices Society, this is the only dedicated SOI conference covering the full technology chain from materials to devices, circuits and system applications. Chaired this year by Gosia Jurczak (manager of the Memories Program at imec), this excellent conference …

Are FinFETs better on SOI? In a series of papers, high-profile blogs and subsequent media coverage, Gold Standard Simulations (aka GSS) has indicated that, yes, FinFETs should indeed be better on SOI. To those of us not deeply involved in the research world, much of this may seem to come out of nowhere.  But there’s …

The 2011 IEEE SOI Conference, held in Tempe, AZ last week was not one to miss…but I did. Happily, I got the papers right away, along with observations shared by some of the folks who did get there. Highlights include excellent and insightful papers from ST, ARM, IBM, Intel, Peregrine and GlobalFoundries, plus many more that indicate …

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 …

SOI is at the heart of silicon photonics. Here’s an overview of past, present and future trends. The existence of Silicon Photonics owes much to serendipity. During the early years of the development of SOI wafer technology probably nobody anticipated that SOI would be a perfect medium for short distance transmission and modulation of light …

With backing from Intel, U.Washington is hosting a new SOI-based photonics foundry service called OpSIS. Looking to launch a photonics revolution as MOSIS did for electronics a few decades ago, OpSIS is a multi-project wafer service. Actual foundry services are provided by BAE Systems. Read the Intel blog entry by Dr. Mario J. Paniccia, director …

Intel has developed a research prototype of a silicon-based optical data connection with integrated lasers. Integrated on SOI, the link can move up to 50 gigabits of data per second.

The Intel research results published in Nature Photonics regarding world-record performance using a silicon-based Avalanche Photodetector (APD) describes continued work on SOI (as detailed in ASN#8). Intel says this opens the door to lowering the cost of optical links running at data rates of 40Gbps or higher and proves, for the first time, that a …

The IEEE’s International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is the world’s showcase for the most important applied research breakthroughs in transistors and electronics technology. Here are a few highlights from some of the papers that presented advances in SOI-based devices and architectures at the most recent meeting (December 2008, San Francisco).

Breakthrough SOI News at VLSI Symposia Intel presented A Scaled Floating Body Cell (FBC) Memory with High-k+Metal Gate on Thin-Silicon and Thin-BOX for 16-nm Technology Node and Beyond. The company said its SOI-based FBC memory cell is the smallest ever reported, and has the lowest operating voltage. It is predicted to be feasible through the …