August 11, 2004 – Silicon Genesis Corp. (SiGen), San Jose, CA, has unveiled a new wafer-level strained substrate technology that uses uniaxial rather than biaxial strain, in an effort to reduce defects and lower costs.

The NGS (“next-generation strain”) technology, compatible with local straining approaches, can be directly integrated on silicon as an “epi-like” strained bulk wafer or on an insulator as a strained-silicon-on-wafer, according to Francois Henley, SiGen president and CEO. He added that production costs associated with NGS would be “significantly lower” than those based on biaxial technologies, due to the elimination of steps for growing and relaxing thick silicon germanium layers.

SiGen claims several chipmakers including Intel and Texas Instruments are exploring uniaxial strain at the transistor level, with Intel already using it in its 90nm processes, and the company said it is actively pursuing the development and commercialization of NGS “with a number of partners.”