Nineteen Electronics Industry Leaders Join Forces to Accelerate SOI (Silicon-On-Insulator) Innovation Into Broad Markets

SOI Industry Consortium Aims to Reduce Costs, Reach New Markets

BOSTON -- Oct. 8, 2007 -- A group of leading companies throughout the electronics industry today announced the launching of the SOI Industry Consortium, aimed at accelerating silicon-on-insulator (SOI) innovation into broad markets by promoting the benefits of SOI technology and reducing the barriers to adoption.

Performance and power consumption are now of primary concern throughout the electronics industry. While early adopters have convincingly demonstrated that SOI is a powerful solution in addressing these concerns, they did so largely on their own. The next wave of adopters needs a proven and complete array of readily-accessible SOI design platforms and IP to ensure transparent design platforms and cost-effective manufacturing. The SOI Consortium aims to bridge the gaps -- both real and perceived -- by reducing adoption costs, making SOI best practices available and facilitating design examples across the value chain.

Covering a spectrum of users, enablers, suppliers and manufacturers, the founding membership roster (listed alphabetically) includes: AMD, ARM, Cadence Design Systems, CEA-Leti, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Innovative Silicon, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, NXP, Samsung, Semico, Soitec, SEH Europe, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, TSMC and UMC.

"Riding the performance wave, SOI has made significant inroads," notes Andre-Jacques Auberton-Herve, the consortium's newly elected chair. "Now, the focus has expanded to reducing power consumption. SOI can cut power consumption significantly -- an enormous advantage -- whether you're running a data center or hoping you have enough battery left to see the end of the match on your mobile telephone. By unifying users and enablers, the SOI Industry Consortium can identify and close gaps in the design chain, making SOI a viable choice for designers over a much broader range of markets."

SOI Industry Consortium will focus on three major goals:

• ensuring that user needs are heard, understood and addressed;
•     --  accelerating and facilitating the requisite collaboration in the        ecosystem to enable silicon-proven solutions; and
•     --  promoting SOI benefits, technology innovation and momentum within the        greater electronics community.

"SOI benefits are now being recognized by most of the major players in the industry and the technology is on the verge of entering the mainstream," notes Bryan Lewis, Semiconductor Research VP of Gartner. "Companies from the entire semiconductor food chain are investing time and money to take SOI to the next level and this should clearly accelerate improvements in reduced power consumption and improved performance for a wide range of devices and applications."

The Consortium's initial focus is on sharing best practices already established by early adopters and facilitating new design proof points demonstrating SOI's performance, power and area advantages. The Board of Directors will be elected later in October.

About the SOI Industry Consortium:

The SOI Industry Consortium is chartered with accelerating silicon-on-insulator (SOI) innovation into broad markets by promoting the benefits of SOI technology and reducing the barriers to adoption. Representing leaders spanning the entire electronics industry infrastructure, SOI Industry Consortium charter members include: AMD, ARM, Cadence Design Systems, CEA-Leti, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Innovative Silicon, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, NXP, Samsung, Semico, Soitec, SEH Europe, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, TSMC and UMC. Membership is open to all companies and institutions throughout the electronics industry. For more information, please see http://www.soiconsortium.org.

SOI Industry Consortium Charter Member Quotes

AMD

"SOI provides AMD (NYSE: AMD - News) with an ideal platform on which to build our wide range of high-performance, energy-efficient microprocessors. The unique balance of performance and reduced power consumption with SOI allows AMD to continue to be a leading innovator of x86 products."  -- Udo Nothelfer, Vice President, AMD Fab 36

ARM

"As a leader in processors and physical IP, ARM has always focused on providing the industry with the most power-efficient products. We believe SOI advances the industry in providing low-power applications, and ARM's involvement in the SOI Industry Consortium will help our customers accelerate their utilization."  -- Tom Lantzsch, Vice President of Marketing, ARM Physical IP

Cadence

"Design technology is an important enabler for the SOI industry, and our products have been used for many successful SOI designs. As the leader in EDA and a member of the SOI Consortium, Cadence is looking forward to helping our customers produce the next generation of SOI designs and accelerating innovation in SOI industry." -- Craig Johnson, Corporate Vice President, Marketing and Strategy, Cadence

CEA-LETI

"The CEA-LETI, home to the invention of Smart Cut(TM) technology and key SOI design innovations, leader in CMOS and RF research on advanced SOI substrates, naturally joins the SOI consortium and its world-leading companies, bringing its expertise over the full SOI value chain, to expand the footprint of this leading-edge technology."  -- Laurent Malier, CEO, CEA-LETI

Chartered

"The end-market requirements that drive our industry today are demanding new and innovative ways of managing power, performance and cost. SOI has been a catalyst for advances in the power/performance ratio for computing and gaming applications, and it has been a growth engine for Chartered's foundry business. As a founding member of this consortium, Chartered is seeking to expand the reach of the SOI value proposition into other market segments requiring similar innovation to solve the complex challenges of meeting end-market demand." -- Kevin Meyer, Vice President of Industry Marketing & Platform Alliances Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd.

Freescale Semiconductor

"Freescale has been a leading adopter of SOI technology for many years in our processor roadmap. The establishment of the SOI Consortium will help expand the adoption of this technology in broad-based applications to enable more end-users to benefit from the intrinsic value of the technology as a means to reduce power consumption while continuing to enhance crucial performance at the system level." -- Lisa Su, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Freescale Semiconductor

IBM

"IBM has a long standing commitment of sharing our technology to stimulate collaboration and develop open communities with industry leaders. SOI has been key to our systems leadership and we believe it could be a game changer in a broad set of applications. We have responded to client demand for SOI by bringing new OEM product offerings to market -- first 45nm ASICs and most recently 130nm RF. We look forward to working closely with the SOI consortium to promote the broad adoption of SOI technology, leveraging its superior performance and power attributes." -- Mark Ireland, VP for Semiconductor Platforms, IBM

Innovative Silicon

"ISi is proud to be an inaugural member of the SOI Industry Consortium. SOI-based devices, such as our Z-RAM memory IP, are poised to deliver superior power, performance, density and cost advantages over bulk CMOS. This consortium's collection of industry leaders should enable extensive mainstream use of SOI design and technology in the near term." -- Jeff Lewis, Vice President Marketing, Innovative Silicon Inc.

KLA-Tencor

"The rapid growth of SOI technology promises key performance and efficiency advantages for all kinds of semiconductor designs. We believe that this consortium will help us understand and solve the unique inspection and metrology challenges of SOI technology over the next several chip generations, with significant potential yield benefits for all chipmakers using or moving to SOI-based devices." -- Brian Trafas, Chief Marketing Officer, KLA-Tencor

Lam Research Corp

"SOI technology is important to our customers' ability to offer higher performance products. Lam joined the consortium to understand what challenges will come forth in the processing and integration of SOI wafers. This engagement enables Lam to continue its commitment to provide solutions to customers before the challenges arise in their wafer fabrication. Our SOI consortium participation engages us with the pioneers of SOI technology and keeps us abreast of all of the requirements for successful implementation of this leading edge capability." -- Richard Gottscho, Group Vice President & General Manager, Etch Businesses, Lam Research

NXP

"As a founding father and long term user of SOI technology we are proud to further develop the technology and exploit new applications. The consortium provides the platform to promote and shape these new developments." -- Derek Wallace, Vice President & Chief Purchasing Officer, NXP Semiconductors

Semico

"Semico is proud to be a founding member of the SOI Industry Consortium. We pride ourselves in identifying emerging and innovative technologies. Three years ago Semico identified SOI as a technology which would enable continued semiconductor advancements in both performance and low power applications. Today it has been adopted for several high volume applications. The outlook for the future is bright as additional applications that have been traditionally bulk CMOS are now evaluating SOI for their future generation designs." -- Jim Feldhan, President, Semico Research Corp.

Soitec

"As an SOI pioneer, the launching of the SOI Industry Consortium is a thrilling moment. This consortium is driven by the needs of the end users, and as such covers the full value chain: from circuit design and substrate engineering to manufacturing, packaging, and system integration. At each step, we have seen how SOI increases performance and functionality and decreases power consumption and costs. Working together, sharing best practices and reaching out to the greater electronics community, we can bring these advantages to broad new markets for the benefit of one and all." -- Andre-Jacques Auberton-Herve CEO and Chairman of the Board, The Soitec Group

STMicroelectronics

"As a long-time proponent of silicon-on-insulator technology, STMicroelectronics is a strong supporter of the SOI consortium, which will be a platform for sharing experience and technical investigation of SOI benefits." -- Mike Thompson, group Vice-President of Front-End Technology and Manufacturing, Advanced R&D - High Performance Logic & derivatives, STMicroelectronics

Synopsys

"SOI is poised to be a significant player in addressing performance and power consumption issues. As a founding member of the SOI Consortium, Synopsys looks forward to helping to make SOI a reality for the mainstream by offering our expertise in electronic design and IP." -- Rich Goldman, Vice President, Strategic Market Development, Synopsys, Inc.

TSMC

"As the dedicated foundry leader, TSMC offers a full gamut of cost effective bulk silicon-based technology platforms to support our customers' broad product applications. In pursuit of higher device performance and lower power consumption, SOI is emerging as one of the niche technology options with trade-offs that the industry should evaluate. Being a founding member of the consortium, TSMC can bring the best practices in technology platform integration and volume manufacturing to support existing and potential SOI applications."  -- Fu-Chieh Hsu, Vice President, Design & Technology Platforms, TSMC

UMC

"We are proud to be a founding member of the SOI Industry Consortium. Joining this initiative will add momentum to the adoption of SOI as an attractive technology option to enhance performance and reduce power consumption for future generation SOCs. We look forward to the more widespread adoption of SOI as UMC's own silicon on insulator technology becomes available for chip designers." -- Lee Chung, Vice President of Corporate Marketing, UMC