Soitec substrates drive CE

July 2015 – At Semicon West 2015, Soitec, held an offsite press conference to discuss the use of the SOI substrate material as method for extending Moore’s Law to the 16nm/14nm node and celebrate Bastille Day. In addition to new manufacturing partners announcements such as Screen, they were also announcing the expansion of the product into key market areas. The substrates are being used by more than 10 different foundries and they are the technology of choice for all of the manufacturers of RF analog front-end modules for today’s 4G/LTE-A smartphones.

Soitec Substrate Application Areas

This widespread adoption has to do with both the economic advantages of the substrate over III-V and BSOS process technologies, and advances in their manufacturing of the substrates. The technology is available in three core solutions – Smart Cut for wafer manufacturing, Smart Stacking for layer transfer solutions and epitaxy solutions. The current process control allows for layer uniformity for FD-SOI substrates on the order of +/-5 Å across a 300mm wafer.

The current workhorse node for the communication ICs is with the 28nm/22nm node. In this space, high speed networking and IOT devices (primarily wearables) are also being made in high volume. The process is available for use by both IDMs and foundries with Samsung on 28nm and GlobalFoundries on 22nm nodes at the forefront. Smart power devices that use the SOI technology, primarily for the automotive marketplace, are on larger geometry nodes. The wafer substrate technology is currently available for 300mm and also 200mm. To supplement the wafer delivery capabilities on the ramp to the 2024 target of 3M 300mm starts/year their European facility is being complemented with a facility in the Asia Pacific are