PARIS, Nov. 02, 2017 – Design engineers living in Silicon Valley have long viewed fully-depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) like the story of the boy who cried wolf. Its massive adoption is always around the corner but never really here ? at least not in the Valley.
In contrast to conventional bulk CMOS technology that chip giants like Intel continue to use for each process node, FD-SOI is something "new" and "foreign" for many U.S. designers. The absence of an FD-SOI ecosystem was always a reason for the naysayers to dismiss the technology. They would certainly never gamble on it.
Nonetheless, FD-SOI has champions like NXP Semiconductors and STMicroelectronics in Europe. Earlier this year, NXP revealed plans to go all in with FD-SOI, starting with its lowest power general-purpose applications processors, called i.MX 7ULP.
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