Silicon-on-insulator (SOI), a semiconductor
process technology available today in mass
production, offers many advantages to chip
designers over traditional generic CMOS:
- Speed: Exploiting the floating-body effect
of an SOI transistor allows a current drive
increase that directly translates to a significant speed improvement.
- Power: When using thin silicon, a near
ideal subthreshold slope can be achieved in
SOI transistors.
- Latchup free: With SOI, devices are fully
wrapped in an insulator, resulting in near
latchup-free circuits.
- Radiation hardness: SOI provides a drastic improvement in rad-hard performance
based on the reduction in exposed silicon
volume.
- RF performance: The use of high-resistivity SOI substrates enables crosstalk reduction and the integration of high quality onchip inductors.
- High temperature compatibility: As
junction leakage is significantly reduced,
circuits operating up to 400°C have
been reported.
- Smart power integration: With the insulation from the SOI stack, high-voltage
devices (to 250 V) can be easily integrated
without any increase in process complexity.
- Embedded memory integration: The
SOI floating-body effect can be used to
create an ultra-dense DRAM block. These
memories offer up to twice the density of
embedded DRAM and up to five times the
density of SRAM, yet they're fast and consume very little power.
Pierre Fazan is the CTO and VP of engineering
of Innovative Silicon Inc. Send your Design Tips
to dharris@penton.com.