Industry Expert Blogs

The LETI days and the associated FD-SOI workshop took place in Grenoble (France) last week and I could not attend in person… but I had the opportunity to speak with LETI CEO Marie Semaria. Before going into details into the 3 key messages from the LETI (FD-SOI, Silicon Impulse and Cool Cube), it’s important to share the great news from this FD-SOI workshop: GlobalFoundries has officially presented their FD-SOI 20nm solution! The first three (business oriented) presentation have opened the second day, I think that the company list is already a good summary:

• 28FD-SOI: Cost effective low power solution for long lived 28 nm (by Kelvin Low – Samsung)
• Advances in Application and Ecosystem for the FD-SOI Technology (by Giorgio Cesana – ST)
• Design/technology Co-Optimization for FD-SOI (by Teepe Gerd – GF)

ST and Samsung supporting FD-SOI is no more a breaking news even if it’s really important that a foundry offering huge wafer capacity like Samsung is part of the game. Beside the title of the presentation from GF, the breaking news is that GF will support 20 (or 22)nm FD-SOI. Why 20nm and not 28nm? This is probably a marketing decision: GF has decided to officially support FD-SOI technology more than one year after Samsung, endorsing 20nm FD-SOI instead of 28nm is a good way to fill this timing gap…

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