Advanced Substrate News #7

INDUSTRY BUZZ

• Luxtera has been awarded a second DARPA grant for its high-bandwidth SOI CMOS Photonics™ transceiver, which it has demonstrated with technology partner Sun Microsystems. It has also announced a related breakthrough in SOI CMOS photodetectors.

• ISi says its new Z-RAM Gen2 high-density, SOI-based memory IP, which is twice as fast as the previous generation and massively lowers memory read/write power, has been licensed to AMD.

• By mid-2007, AMD (which builds all its 64-bit microprocessors on SOI) expects to be fully converted to 65nm production at Fab 36.

• Atmel claims the industry's best EMC performance with its new ATA6662 stand-alone LIN bus transceiver IC for automotive electronics. It also announced the ATA6831 driver IC for smooth DC motor control with reduced noise in automotive and industrial applications. Both are based on the company’s high-voltage BCD-on-SOI technology (SMARTIS™), enabling a broad range of protection features and “a very attractive price.”

• In SOI-related news, IBM has announced:
- Production of a 65nm version of the Cell chip at its East Fishkill fab.
- 2008 availability of embedded DRAM for high-performance at low power
in about one-third the space.

• Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) reports that since the company’s participation in Stanford University’s Folding@home™ program launched in March, response from the Cell-based Playstation®3 users has been “phenomenal”. The distributed computing project aims to understand protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. The more than quarter of a million PS3 users have more than doubled the program’s capacity, enabling it to reach over 700 teraflops.

• In joint work with the Institute of Medical Physics (IMP) in Erlangen, Germany, Mercury’s Cell Accelerator Board won Advanced Imaging magazine's 2007 Imaging Solution of the Year Award in the medical category for increasing the speed of CT scans by 100x.

• Freescale’s SOI-related news includes:
- The company has joined the IBM technology alliance, covering SOI technologies as well as advanced semiconductor research and design enablement transitioning at the 45nm generation. Freescale is the first partner in the alliance to participate in both low-power and high-performance technology research and development.
- The latest in its 85xx line of SOI-based PowerQUICC III processors: the MPC8544E. Freescale says it’s one of the industry's lowest power-consumption SoCs to deliver gigabit performance, consuming only 3.75 W typical core power and greatly reducing the challenges of thermal management in performance-driven, fanless embedded applications.
- Q2 2007 sampling of its line of MSC8144 quad-core DSPs. Based on Freescale's 90-nm SOI, the devices embed four StarCore SC3400 DSP cores each running at up to 1GHz, generating equivalent performance to a 4GHz single core DSP.

• Micralyne, which is streamlining MEMS fabrication with its SOI-based Micragem™ process, has broken ground on a facility expansion to increase its manufacturing capacity to accommodate its growing customer base.

• Analog Devices (ADI) has extended its family of innovative differential amplifiers for driving analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with the ADA4937-1 and ADA4938-1. The ultra-low distortion is achieved through the use of ADI’s XFCB-3, a proprietary and specialized silicon germanium (SiGe) SOI process technology.

• Honeywell is rolling out a roster of SOI-based, 150nm rad-hard chips, fabricated at its new, DoD-accredited fab in Plymouth, Minnesota:
- the HXSRO1608, the first 16-million bit SRAM for radiation-tolerant and radiation-hardened applications.
- the HXNV0100, the world’s first one-million bit non-volatile MRAM for strategic space electronics applications.
- the HX5000 , the world’s first 12-million gate ASIC specifically designed for radiation-tolerant and radiation-hardened applications.
- the first Radiation-Hardened FPGA specifically designed for space borne applications, built with Honeywell’s .35 micron SOI CMOS.

• Semico Research has a new study, “SOI: A Long Road to an Overnight Success”.

• Oki Electric has announced the ML8511, which it says is the world's first UV sensor IC using thin-film SOI, enabling easy integration with digital and analog circuits. The sensor has a built in op-amp and analog output, enabling OEMs to develop small, highly mobile and low-cost devices for medical and other applications. Sampling begins in June.

Print Industry Buzz

Back to home page