Silicon-on-insulator consortium formed to accelerate adoption

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 10/9/2007

To accelerate silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology adoption, and address performance and power consumption issues that are now of primary concern to chip designers, a group of electronics industry players announced yesterday that the SOI Industry Consortium has been formed.

Early adopters have demonstrated that SOI is one way to address performance and power consumption challenges, but have done so mainly on their own. The SOI Industry Consortium believes that the next wave of adopters needs a proven and complete array of readily-accessible SOI design platforms and IP to allow transparent design platforms and cost-effective manufacturing and aims to bridge the gaps through adoption cost reduction, making SOI best practices available and facilitating design examples across the value chain.

Founding members of the consortium are 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.

Andre-Jacques Auberton-Herve, the consortium’s elected chair as well as CEO and chairman of the Soitec Group explained in a statement, “Riding the performance wave, SOI has made significant inroads. 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.”

The SOI Industry Consortium said its goals are to ensure that user needs are heard, understood and addressed; to accelerate and facilitate the requisite collaboration in the ecosystem to allow silicon-proven solutions; and to promote SOI benefits, technology innovation and momentum within the greater electronics community.

IBM’s Mark Ireland, VP for semiconductor platforms reminded that IBM has a long standing commitment of sharing its 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 45-nm ASICs and most recently 130-nm RF.”

Initially, the consortium will focus on sharing best practices already established by early adopters and facilitating new design proof points demonstrating SOI’s performance, power and area advantages.

A board of directors will be elected later this month.