Home > News & Analysis > Soitec announces volume production of new generation of high-resistivity SOI substrates for cellular phone and Wi-Fi markets

Analysis

Soitec announces volume production of new generation of high-resistivity SOI substrates for cellular phone and Wi-Fi markets

9th March 2010

Soitec

ES Admin

0 0

The Soitec Group (Euronext Paris), the world’s leading supplier of engineered substrates for the microelectronics industry, announced today volume production of its new generation of state-of-the-art high-resistivity (HR) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates to serve the growing cellular phone and Wi-Fi markets. Soitec recently completed qualification at major customers for volume production in response to their rapidly growing demand. Soitec fined-tuned its HR-SOI process to stabilize the base wafer resistivity in order to meet all cellular electrical specifications.

The shift to multi-band, multi-mode radio functionality in today’s handsets and the growth of Wi-Fi based-applications is driving a move to SOI-enabled solutions, which can enhance integration and programmability while reducing cost-of-ownership (COO) in RF Front End Modules more effectively than competing technologies. Soitec’s Smart Cut technology is used to integrate a high resistivity base wafer enabling low signal absorption below the oxide. This high-resistivity option for SOI wafers enables chip designers to reach unprecedented levels of RF and mixed signal integration, which will free up valuable area for the RF functions by a factor of ten on the board.

“Our HR-SOI capacity is in place to serve the growing cellular market demand,” says Paul Boudre, Chief Operating Officer, Soitec. “This new substrate generation enables chip designers to meet their demanding wireless performance requirements – low RF substrate loss, high isolation, high linearity – on very cost-effective silicon.”

High-resistivity handle layers can also be combined with advanced SOI technologies that leverage a very thin top layer of silicon. Such wafers are excellent candidates for combining wireless functionality with lower power and higher speed logic on a single chip using a standard SOI CMOS process.

Manufactured in 200mm, Soitec’s HR SOI substrates offer >1kOhm.cm resistivity, available in any custom silicon and box thickness. The company also offers HR SOI substrates in 300mm for the system on chip (SoC) market working at the 90nm node and below.