COT Design Kit Gets Fabless Houses Into 90-nm SOI

Sept. 15, 2005

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) promises greater speed and lower power consumption than bulk CMOS processes. But it has been unavailable to the fabless semiconductor world—until now. Thanks to a customer-owned-tooling (COT) SOI design kit from SOISIC, SOI technology proven on Freescale Semiconductor's 90-nm SOI process is now available to the mainstream market.

The kit consists of multi-V_t standardcell libraries, memory compilers, and standard I/Os for manufacturing on the Freescale process. Compared with bulk CMOS processes, it offers a 30% to 40% speed improvement, a 2X power consumption drop, and an area reduction of up to 10% (see the table). SOI technology draws its speed from improved transistor performance. Power-consumption gains result from lower capacitance, much lower leakage current, and smaller cell sizes.

Bulk CMOS processes are expected to fail at the 65-nm mode. So, a move to make SOI available beyond large integrated-device manufacturers (IDMs) is necessary to maintain the process-technology curve. SOI already is a mainstream technology, with AMD's processors, PowerPC chips, and all of the major video-gaming platforms driving volume.

With the SOISIC design kit, systemona-chip designers can work with their industry-standard EDA tool flows. No specific tools or retraining of design engineers are required. All SOI-specific effects are handled at the intellectualproperty level, which makes them fully transparent to users.

SOISIC
www.soisic.com

About the Author

David Maliniak | MWRF Executive Editor

In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.