#13 | SUMMER 2009
posted July 30, 2009
Industry BUZZ
SOI in Action
In & Around Our Industry
Advanced Substrate Corners
Get the word out: SOI is Simply Greener
A listing of key upcoming events across the industry
Must-read papers from recent conferences and journals
Full archival access to all editions of Advanced Substrate News
INDUSTRY BUZZ: What’s New. What’s Hot. What’s Next.
- Freescale’s new SOI-based MPC8535E is a full-featured, high-performance, low-power processor designed to support fanless operation for power-sensitive networking, industrial and media processing applications. It is a Freescale Energy Efficiency product.
- Soitec’s 300mm ultra-thin SOI (UTSOI) wafer platform is qualified and ready for FD-SOI applications at 22nm and beyond. The extremely thin top-layer silicon (<20nm) is manufactured to a thickness uniformity tolerance of ±5 Å (angstroms) in high volume with high yields.
- Luxtera:
• Announced production status of the world’s first commercial silicon CMOS photonics fabrication process. Freescale is providing the foundry services, the first to commercially integrate SOI photonics and SOI CMOS electronics in a single high-volume, low-cost chip for high performance computing, data communications, and mainstream consumer electronics markets.
• At SPIE/Photonics West ’09, Luxtera’s “Blazar” was both the overall “Best In Show” and winner of the Photonics Systems category for the 2008 Prism Awards. Blazer is a monolithic optoelectronic Optical Active Cable assembly reaching up to 300 meters and aggregated data rates up to 40 Gbps.
- NXP Semiconductors expands its line of SOI-based HS-CAN transceivers with the TJA1042 and TJA1051. This latest generation features enhanced CAN functionality, improved performance, greater reliability, environmentally friendly packaging and reduced system costs. Both are approved by major European and North American car manufacturers and are now in volume production.
IBM & Soitec team up on wafer-level 3D Integration
Soitec and IBM are collaborating to accelerate 3D integration technology at 22nm and beyond. Soitec will leverage its Smart Stacking™ technology and all of its wafer-level bonding expertise including oxide-to-oxide and metal-to-metal molecular bonding — developed in collaboration with CEA-Leti.
Vision for an optically connected 3-D supercomputer chip
(Courtesy: IBM Research)
- Jazz Semiconductor, a foundry leader in Analog-Intensive Mixed-Signal (AIMS) solutions, includes support for SOI-based designs in its new Direct Multiproject Wafer (MPW) shuttle program, offering quick and low-cost prototyping for commercial and military/defense customers.
- New 45nm chips from AMD (which builds all its 64-bit microprocessors on SOI):
• Athlon™ II X2 250 processor for mainstream consumers and the Phenom™ II X2 550 Black Edition processor, the first ever dual-core AMD Phenom II CPU.
• the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor family, to address rising demand for increased performance balanced by greater power-efficiency for cloud computing and web serving environments.
- Construction on GlobalFoundries’ Fab 2 in Saratoga County, New York, gets underway this summer, with full-scale manufacturing slated for 2012.
- Frost & Sullivan’s new report, 3D IC Technology — An Assessment, includes a section entitled, SOI — A Key Substrate Enabler to 3D IC.
- Atmel has received LIN2.1 certification for its LIN transceiver ATA6662 and LIN System Basis Chip ATA6624, which are manufactured in SMART-I.S., the company’s SOI technology.
- IBM dominates the latest Supercomputing ‘Green500 List’, with 18 of the Top20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world. Because energy efficiency — including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding workloads — is a core IBM design principle, all 18 of those systems are built on SOI-based processors.
- Ametek Aerospace & Defense credits its SOI-based hydraulic pressure transducers with the win to supply the ultra-long range, top-of-the-line new Gulfstream G650 business jet. SOI enables much longer design accuracy, resulting in more accurate system performance with reduced weight and reduced cost of ownership for aircraft operators.
- Clare’s new CPC7232 is an eight-channel high-voltage analog switch IC designed using the company’s proprietary BCDMOS on SOI process, for medical ultrasound imaging, test equipment, printers, and industrial measurement applications.
