Bernin, France–SOITEC, a manufacturer of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers for use in semiconductor manufacturing, announced outstanding performance for the first half of fiscal year 2000-2001.Total sales for the first half of the year are equal to a growth of 183% over the same period last year.

“SOITEC’s strong performance was led by continuous demand from our U.S. customers,” says Andre Auberton-Herve, president of SOITEC. “In the first 6 months of fiscal 2000-2001, 200mm wafers represented 67% of total volumes sold, compared with 30% in the same period last year. Virtually all IC manufacturers in the U.S. are turning to SOI, which will soon become the most commonly used substrate in logic and memory devices for high-performance and advanced wireless and portable applications.”

“We also sustained our excellent operational execution and met our aggressive goal of increasing shipments of our UNIBOND SOI product. We will continue to work closely with our customers and partners to meet the challenge of providing the best performance SOI material, and we anticipate our sublicense partnership will soon begin to generate royalty income. The industry needs SOI, and we are aggressively working to establish our proprietary Smart Cut technology as the worldwide standard for the manufacture of SOI wafers,” Auberton-Herve says.