October 12, 2007 — A group of 19 leading companies from throughout the electronics industry have launched the SOI Industry Consortium to help accelerate adoption into broad markets by promoting the benefits of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology and reducing the barriers to adoption.

Performance and power consumption are now of primary concern throughout the electronics industry, the group says—and while early adopters have convincingly demonstrated that SOI is a helpful tool for addressing these concerns, they did so largely on their own. Further, the group says, the next wave of adopters needs a proven and complete array of readily accessible SOI design platforms and IP to ensure transparent design platforms and cost-effective manufacturing.
The SOI Consortium aims to bridge the gaps — both real and perceived — by reducing adoption costs, making SOI best practices available and facilitating design examples across the value chain.

Covering a spectrum of users, enablers, suppliers and manufacturers, the founding membership roster (listed alphabetically) includes: AMD, ARM, Cadence Design Systems, CEA-Leti, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Innovative Silicon, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, NXP, Samsung, Semico, Soitec, SEH Europe, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, TSMC, and UMC.

“Riding the performance wave, SOI has made significant inroads,” notes Andre-Jacques Auberton-Herve of Soitec, the consortium’s newly elected chair. “Now, the focus has expanded to reducing power consumption. SOI can cut power consumption significantly — an enormous advantage — whether you’re running a data center or hoping you have enough battery left to see the end of the match on your mobile telephone. By unifying users and enablers, the SOI Industry Consortium can identify and close gaps in the design chain, making SOI a viable choice for designers over a much broader range of markets.”

The SOI Industry Consortium will focus on three major goals: Ensuring that user needs are heard, understood and addressed; accelerating and facilitating the requisite collaboration to enable silicon-proven solutions; and promoting SOI benefits, technology innovation and momentum within the greater electronics community.