Glo-Fo sauces up with FD-SOI

Aiming for the car market

Globalfoundries will have its 12-inch wafer fabs in Dresden, Germany, focus on using FD-SOI process technology to fabricate automotive chips for the European market.

According to Digitimes,Glo-Fo’s Chinese fab will be dedicated to manufacturing ICs or IoT (Internet of Things) and 5G applications in China.

GF vice president Thomas Morgenstern said that tech development blueprints had been drawn up for two different directions for different application markets.

First, the 14LPP/12LPP/7LPP FinFET processes will fabricate high-performance computing chips for sensors, graphic cards, high-end smartphone application processors, network communications, and advanced driver assistance systems.

FD-SOI technology will make wireless communication chips featuring embedded memory, low power consumption and high cost-performance ratio, suitable for applications in midrange and low-end smartphone APs, IoT, automotive electronics, and phone cameras.

Morgenstern said Glo-Fo’s Dresden fabs have carried out a limited number of runs using  22nm FD-SOI process technology. 

He said 22nm FD-SOI process is equivalent to 14nm polySiON/HKMG process in performance, but similar in cost to 28nm polySiON/HKMG node; and the 12nm process of the former is equivalent to 10nm in performance and 16nm in cost for the latter.

GF will start in 2018 to transfer its 22nm FD-SOI process tech to its 12-inch wafer fab in Chengdu, China, a joint venture plant between GF and Chengdu City Government.

The plant will start volume production using 22nm FD-SOI tech in the second half of 2019, with annual production capacity set at one million pieces to support IoT and 5G applications in the China market.