Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) intellectual property supplier Soisic has today that one its foundry customers had produced six working integrated circuits (ICs) using an ASIC-based SOI design process.
The news marks the beginning of the use of SOI technology for fabless chipmakers, the company declared; so far SOI has been the utilized primarily in MPUs produced by IDMs.
The Grenoble, France-based Soisic declined to identify the foundry, identifying it as a "top-tier Asian foundry." While No. 3 foundry, Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor, has access to SOI technology through partner IBM, both Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) and United Microelectronics (UMC) have been working with the technology for some time as well.
In mid 2004 UMC said that it created an engineering technique it dubbed direct-tunneling induced floating-body potential, claiming that it gives PMOS transistors a 30 percent increase in drive current compared to conventional body-grounded SOI transistors. TSMC then announced in late 2004 that it was working with U.S. IDM Freescale to jointly develop a new generation of SOI transistor front-end technology targeted for the 65nm process node.
Sosic's IP, incidentally, is utilized in Freescale's 90nm SOI process; Soisic announced last August that it was offering design kits for multi-Vt standard cell libraries, memory compilers and standard I/Os for manufacturing on Freescale's 90nm SOI process technology.
As for the work with its Asian foundry customer, Soisic said that it successfully taped-out and validated on its first pass standard cells with three Vts, I/O circuitry and memories, as well as a data encryption and decryption circuit, consisting of 8 million transistors.
The tape-outs further validate customer owned tooling (COT) design kit, the company declared. The kit does not require any specific tools or engineer retraining, since all SOI-specific effects are transparently handled at the IP level, according to Soisic. The company further said it continues to work with major EDA tool vendors, and that its full design kit is currently available to designers.
