Category Archives: Semiconductors

Alliance Memory today announced that it is offering several end-of-life 8G DDR3L SDRAMs for which Micron Technology Inc. announced a last time buy date of Jan. 13, 2019. For three of the devices, the company is also offering versions with Alliance Memory part numbers that use the same genuine single-die Micron silicon as the Micron-numbered parts.

The following Micron 8G DDR3L SDRAMs are now available from Alliance Memory:

Micron Part Number Alliance Memory Identical Replacement
MT41K512M16HA-107:A N/A
MT41K512M16HA-107 IT:A N/A
MT41K512M16HA-125:A AS4C512M16D3L-12BCN
MT41K1G8SN-125:A AS4C1G8MD3L-12BCN
MT41K512M16HA-125 IT:A * AS4C512M16D3L-12BIN
*Only available in Alliance Memory branded version.

“We are committed to supporting our customers’ legacy SDRAM needs,” said David Bagby, president and CEO of Alliance Memory. “These are genuine Micron parts with Micron part numbers, and we’re pleased to be extending their life cycle by making them available from Alliance Memory.”

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $2.11 billion in billings worldwide in December 2018 (three-month average basis), according to the December Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Billings Report published today by SEMI. The billings figure is 8.5 percent higher than the final November 2018 level of $1.94 billion, and is 12.1 percent lower than the December 2017 billings level of $2.40 billion.

“December billings of North American equipment manufacturers ended 2018 on a positive note,” said Ajit Manocha, president and CEO of SEMI. “Spending for logic and foundry offset the decline in memory investments for the month.”

The SEMI Billings report uses three-month moving averages of worldwide billings for North American-based semiconductor equipment manufacturers. Billings figures are in millions of U.S. dollars.
Billings
(3-mo. avg.)
Year-Over-Year
July 2018
$2,377.9
4.8%
August 2018
$2,236.8
2.5%
September 2018
$2,078.6
1.2%
October 2018
$2,029.2
0.5%
November 2018 (final)
$1,943.6
-5.3%
December 2018 (prelim)
$2,108.9
-12.1%

Source: SEMI (www.semi.org), January 2019

SEMI publishes a monthly North American Billings report and issues the Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Market Statistics (WWSEMS) report in collaboration with the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan (SEAJ). The WWSEMS report currently reports billings by 24 equipment segments and by seven end market regions. SEMI also has a long history of tracking semiconductor industry fab investments in detail on a company-by-company and fab-by-fab basis in its World Fab Forecast and SEMI FabView databases. These powerful tools provide access to spending forecasts, capacity ramp, technology transitions, and other information for over 1,000 fabs worldwide. For an overview of available SEMI market data, please visit www.semi.org/en/MarketInfo.

ULVAC Technologies, Inc. (www.ulvac.com) has introduced the LS series of dry screw pumps as a high performance, more compact and lower cost replacement to multi-stage dry Roots pumps for a wide range of vacuum applications. With four pumping speeds from 120 to 1,000 m3/h, the LS series provides high pumping speed, compact size and low power consumption in a low cost package.

The ULVAC LS pump features a pair of conical shaped, variable pitch, deeply machined steel screws that allow the pump to be 1/3 shorter in length and 1/3 lighter in weight than other screw pumps in the same pumping speed class. This advanced screw design also increases the pumping speed near atmospheric pressure, allowing the LS pump to deliver a 20% faster pump down time while using less power. Power consumption is no more than 0.6 kW upon reaching ultimate pressure. A specialized built-in silencer reduces the noise level to not more than 61 dB(a). The lighter weight and smaller size of the LS series pumps compared to other dry pumps makes them excellent candidates for easy retrofits. When repairs are needed, cost and time is half that of a typical multi-stage Roots dry pump.

An international team of researchers has reported a breakthrough in fabricating atom-thin processors – a discovery that could have far-reaching impacts on nanoscale chip production and in labs across the globe where scientists are exploring 2D materials for ever-smaller and -faster semiconductors.

The team, headed by New York University Tandon School of Engineering Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Elisa Riedo, outlined the research results in the latest issue of Nature Electronics.

They demonstrated that lithography using a probe heated above 100 degrees Celsius outperformed standard methods for fabricating metal electrodes on 2D semiconductors such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). Such transitional metals are among the materials that scientists believe may supplant silicon for atomically small chips. The team’s new fabrication method – called thermal scanning probe lithography (t-SPL) – offers a number of advantages over today’s electron beam lithography (EBL).

First, thermal lithography significantly improves the quality of the 2D transistors, offsetting the Schottky barrier, which hampers the flow of electrons at the intersection of metal and the 2D substrate. Also, unlike EBL, the thermal lithography allows chip designers to easily image the 2D semiconductor and then pattern the electrodes where desired. Also, t-SPL fabrication systems promise significant initial savings as well as operational costs: They dramatically reduce power consumption by operating in ambient conditions, eliminating the need to produce high-energy electrons and to generate an ultra-high vacuum. Finally, this thermal fabrication method can be easily scaled up for industrial production by using parallel thermal probes.

Riedo expressed hope that t-SPL will take most fabrication out of scarce clean rooms – where researchers must compete for time with the expensive equipment – and into individual laboratories, where they might rapidly advance materials science and chip design. The precedent of 3D printers is an apt analogy: Someday these t-SPL tools with sub-10 nanometer resolution, running on standard 120-volt power in ambient conditions, could become similarly ubiquitous in research labs like hers.

“Patterning Metal Contacts on Monolayer MoS2 with Vanishing Schottky Barriers Using Thermal Nanolithography” appears in the January 2019 edition of Nature Electronics and can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-018-0191-0 with a “News & Views” analysis at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-018-0197-7.

Riedo’s work on thermal probes dates back more than a decade, first with IBM Research – Zurich and subsequently SwissLitho, founded by former IBM researchers. A process based on a SwissLitho system was developed and used for the current research. She began exploring thermal lithography for metal nanomanufacturing at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), working alongside co-first-authors of the paper, Xiaorui Zheng and Annalisa Calò, who are now post-doctoral researchers at NYU Tandon; and Edoardo Albisetti, who worked on the Riedo team with a Marie Curie Fellowship.

Annual semiconductor unit shipments, including integrated circuits and optoelectronics, sensors, and discrete (O-S-D) devices grew 10% in 2018 and surpassed the one trillion unit mark for the first time, based on data presented in the new, 2019 edition of IC Insights’ McClean Report—A Complete Analysis and Forecast of the Integrated Circuit Industry. As shown in Figure 1, semiconductor unit shipments climbed to 1,068.2 billion units in 2018 and are expected to climb to 1,142.6 billion in 2019, which equates to 7% growth for the year.  Starting in 1978 with 32.6 billion units and going through 2019, the compound annual growth rate for semiconductor units is forecast to be 9.1%, a very impressive growth figure over 40 years, given the cyclical and often volatile nature of the semiconductor industry.

Figure 1

Over the span of just four years (2004-2007), semiconductor shipments broke through the 400-, 500-, and 600-billion unit levels before the global financial meltdown caused a big decline in semiconductor unit shipments in 2008 and 2009.  Unit growth rebounded sharply with 25% growth in 2010, which saw semiconductor shipments surpass 700 billion devices. Another strong increase in 2017 (12% growth) lifted semiconductor unit shipments beyond the 900-billion level before the one trillion mark was achieved in 2018.

The largest annual increase in semiconductor unit growth during the timespan shown was 34% in 1984, and the biggest decline was 19% in 2001 following the dot-com bust.  The global financial meltdown and ensuing recession caused semiconductor shipments to fall in both 2008 and 2009; the only time that the industry experienced consecutive years in which unit shipments declined.  The 25% increase in 2010 was the second-highest growth rate across the time span.

The percentage split of total semiconductor shipments is forecast to remain heavily weighted toward O-S-D devices in 2019 (Figure 2).  O-S-D devices are forecast to account for 70% of total semiconductor units compared to 30% for ICs.  This percentage split has remained fairly steady over the years.  In 1980, O-S-D devices accounted for 78% of semiconductor units and ICs represented 22%.  Many of the semiconductor categories forecast to have the strongest unit growth rates in 2019 are those that are essential building-blocks for smartphones, automotive electronics systems, and devices that are used in computing systems essential to artificial intelligence, “big data,” and deep learning applications.

Figure 2

 

ZEISS today unveiled a new suite of high-resolution 3D X-ray imaging solutions for failure analysis (FA) of advanced semiconductor packages, including 2.5/3D and fan-out wafer-level packages. The new ZEISS systems include the Xradia 600-series Versa and Xradia 800 Ultra X-ray microscopes (XRM) for submicron and nanoscale package FA, respectively, as well as the new Xradia Context microCT. With the addition of these new systems to its existing family of products, ZEISS now provides the broadest portfolio of 3D X-ray imaging technologies serving the semiconductor industry.

“Throughout its 170-year history, ZEISS has pushed the frontiers of scientific research and advanced the start-of-the-art in imaging technologies to enable new industrial applications and technological innovations,” stated Dr. Raj Jammy, president, ZEISS Process Control Solutions (PCS) and Carl Zeiss SMT, Inc. “Now more than ever in the semiconductor industry, where package as well as device features are shrinking in all three dimensions, new imaging solutions are needed to quickly isolate failures in order to enable higher package yields. We are extremely pleased to announce this trio of new 3D X-ray imaging solutions for advanced semiconductor packaging, which provides our customers with a powerful high-resolution toolset to improve their failure analysis success rates.”

Advanced Packaging Requires New Defect Detection and Failure Analysis Methods
As the semiconductor industry approaches the limits of CMOS scaling, semiconductor packaging needs to help bridge the performance gap. To continue producing ever-smaller and faster devices with lower power requirements, the semiconductor industry is turning to package innovation through 3D stacking of chips and other novel packaging formats. This drives increasingly complex package architectures and new manufacturing challenges, along with increased risk of package failures. Furthermore, since the physical location of failures is often buried within these complex 3D structures, conventional methods for visualizing failure locations are becoming less effective. New techniques are required to efficiently isolate and determine the root cause of failures in these advanced packages.

To address these needs, ZEISS has developed a new suite of 3D X-ray imaging solutions that provides submicron and nanoscale 3D images of features and defects buried within intact structures in advanced package 3D architectures. This is enabled by rotating a sample and capturing a series of 2D X-ray images from different perspectives, followed by reconstruction of 3D volumes using sophisticated mathematical models and algorithms. An unlimited number of virtual cross-sections of the 3D volume may be viewed from any angle – providing valuable insight of failure locations prior to physical failure analysis (PFA). The combination of submicron and nanoscale XRM solutions from ZEISS provides a unique FA workflow that can significantly enhance FA success rates. ZEISS’s new Xradia Context microCT offers high contrast and resolution in a large field of view, using projection-based geometric magnification, and is fully upgradable to Xradia Versa.

New Imaging Solutions in Detail
Xradia 600-series Versa is the next generation of 3D XRM for non-destructive imaging of localized defects within intact advanced semiconductor packages. It excels in structural and FA applications for process development, yield improvement and construction analysis. Based on the award-winning Versa platform with Resolution at a Distance (RaaD) capability, Xradia 600-series Versa offers unsurpassed performance for high-resolution imaging of larger samples at long working distances to determine root causes of defects and failures in packages, circuit boards and 300 mm wafers. It can easily visualize defects associated with package-level failures, such as cracks in bumps or microbumps, solder wetting problems or through silicon via (TSV) voids. The 3D visualization of defects prior to PFA reduces artifacts and guides cross-section orientations, leading to improved FA success rates. Features include:

  • 0.5 micron spatial resolution, 40 nm min voxel size
  • Up to 2x higher throughput than Xradia 500-series Versa, achieved while maintaining high resolution with excellent source spot-size stability and thermal management control across the full kV and power range
  • Improved ease of use, including fast-activation source control
  • Ability to observe submicron structural changes within a package successively imaged at multiple reliability test read points

Xradia 800 Ultra brings 3D XRM to the nanoscale realm, producing images of buried features with nanoscale spatial resolution while preserving the volume integrity of the region of interest. Applications include process analysis, construction analysis and defect analysis of ultra-fine-pitch flip chip and bump connections – enabling process improvement for ultra-fine-pitch package and back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnects. Xradia 800 Ultra enables visualization of the texture and volume of solder consumed by intermetallic compounds in fine-pitch copper pillar microbumps. Defect sites are preserved during imaging, enabling targeted follow-up analysis by a variety of techniques. The construction quality of blind assemblies, such as wafer-to-wafer bonded interconnect and direct hybrid bonding, can be characterized in 3D. Features include:

  • 150 nm and 50 nm spatial resolution (sample preparation is required)
  • Optional pico-second laser sample prep tool, enabling extraction of an intact volume sample (typically 100 microns in diameter) in under one hour
  • Compatibility with a wide range of options for follow-on analysis, including transmission electronic microscopy (TEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), atomic force microscopy (AFM), secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS) and nanoprobing

Nikon Corporation (“Nikon”) (TYO: 7731), ASML Holding N.V. (“ASML”) (NASDAQ: ASML) and Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH (“Zeiss”) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding relating to a comprehensive settlement of all legal proceedings over patents for lithography equipment and digital cameras.

The Memorandum of Understanding is a binding agreement that concerns all pending disputes between Nikon, ASML and Zeiss in Europe, Japan and the United States, including at the U. S. International Trade Commission. The three companies expect to execute a definitive settlement and cross-license agreement and dismiss all legal proceedings between the parties in February 2019. The terms of the Memorandum include a payment to Nikon by ASML and Zeiss of a total of EUR 150 million (approximately 19.0 billion Japanese Yen*).  Furthermore, the cross-license agreement contemplated by the Memorandum includes mutual royalty payments of 0.8% over the sales of immersion lithography systems for 10 years from the signature date of the parties’ definitive agreement.

* Based on an exchange rate of 1 EUR = 125 yen

SEMICON Korea 2019 opens tomorrow with electronics industry growth drivers artificial intelligence (AI), Smart manufacturing, and MEMS and sensors in the spotlight. Expected to draw 50,000 attendees, the January 23-25 exposition and conference gathers industry leaders and visionaries for insights into the latest technologies, innovations and trends in the electronics industry.

With Smart applications expected to spur strong memory growth and Korea accounting for the overwhelming share of the global memory market, the prospect of substantial memory expansion bodes well for the region. SEMICON Korea, the premier Korean microelectronics industry event with more than 2,000 booths from nearly 500 companies, provides opportunities to Connect, Collaborate and Innovate in high-growth areas of microelectronics including:

  • AI
  • Smart manufacturing
  • Metrology and inspection
  • MEMS and sensors
  • Test

SEMICON Korea 2019 showcases industry leaders offering a vision of the future of semiconductors:

  • Eunsoo Shim, senior vice president, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Samsung Electronics – On-Device Artificial Intelligence
  • Walden C. Rhines, CEO emeritus, Mentor, a Siemens Business – Domain Specific Processors Drive Changing Outlook for Semiconductor Memory
  • Myung-Hee Na, distinguished engineer, IBM Research –The Era of AI Hardware

At the SEMICON Korea SEMI Technology Symposium (STS), in-depth presentations by industry experts focus on semiconductor manufacturing processes, the latest trends, next-generation semiconductor roadmaps and the industry’s strategic direction.

SEMICON Korea launches a Workforce Pavilion to attract the young talent critical to sustaining industry innovation and growth. In the Meet the Experts mentoring program, more than 600 college students will meet with industry experts to explore career paths in microelectronics. Tutorials will enhance university students’ understanding of semiconductor manufacturing and related technology trends, covering areas including lithography, ferroelectrics, plasma and etching, cleaning and CMP, and packaging.

To help SEMI members companies develop new business, SEMICON Korea offers the Supplier Search Program (SSP). This year, industry heavyweights Samsung, SK Hynix, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Lam Research, Micron, Sony and Toshiba will seek new business opportunities as they meet with more than 100 suppliers.

For more event information, please click here.

By Ajit Manocha

Last year the industry posted another remarkable double-digit revenue growth year. IC shipments eclipsed one trillion units for the first time and continued to enable an ever-expanding array of silicon intensive-applications.

2018 was also a pivotal year of transformation at SEMI. Setting our sights firmly on building more value for SEMI members, we doubled down on priorities I established this time last year. We advocated intensively on global trade policies, industry talent needs, and critical environment, health and safety (EHS) concerns. To underpin our efforts around talent, we took the bold step to reinvigorate the industry’s identity with a dynamic image campaign. Above all, we targeted critical industry-wide issues to help us realize the ambition of becoming a trillion-dollar industry in the next decade.

Workforce Development

Redefining our approach to talent development in 2018 was and remains a top priority. A diverse, highly skilled workforce is crucial to the industry’s ability to innovate. Last year we ramped up a number of  SEMI High Tech U (HTU) programs to inspire young people and attract them to careers in high-tech manufacturing. To date, more than 130,000 students have been touched by HTU – through student or teacher programs.

Over the past year, we designed a new university outreach program and established partnerships with 100 institutions. We established Workforce Pavilions at SEMICON events in Southeast Asia, the U.S., Taiwan, Europe and Japan for students to explore career opportunities and meet with recruiters. We thrilled at seeing sponsors hire young talent at SEMI events. This year, all SEMICONs worldwide will feature Workforce Pavilions.

SEMI also formalized its commitment to Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) with the establishment of a D&I council to shape new programs including the recently launched Spotlight on SEMI Women. To localize and fully optimize our D&I programs, we established regional workforce councils in every region we serve.

We unveiled the SEMI Mentoring Program to support students and young professionals on this journey by facilitating one-on-one mentoring relationships with industry professionals. Hundreds of mentees have enrolled. But we still need more mentors.  I urge you to join the program.

During the year, SEMI also expanded its workforce staff and developed a comprehensive workforce strategy with programs that engage students as early as elementary school and inspires them through high school and college. The program provides pathways to professional careers, building a pipeline to fill the short-term and long-term talent needs of the industry.

Industry Image Campaign

As we developed the comprehensive workforce development program, we knew we had to refresh the industry’s image and appeal to the next generation through contemporary media and communications channels. So we recently launched a bold, innovative campaign to raise industry awareness and attract students and recent graduates to careers in semiconductor manufacturing.

Our You’re Welcome campaign is a novel, creative approach that blends entertainment, media and storytelling to excite students about the industry. The campaign went viral immediately and within weeks had more than 5.5 million social media impressions and 2.3 million video views.

Trade Policy Advocacy

Rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China catapulted global trade policy to the forefront of industry concerns in 2018. Since the tariffs have taken force, semiconductor companies have faced higher costs, greater uncertainty, and difficulty selling products abroad. The tariffs have forced many SEMI member companies to pause or rethink their investment strategies.

SEMI quickly engaged U.S. policymakers and provided resources for SEMI members. We formed a member trade task force, staged trade compliance seminars in China, and convened meetings with over 110 U.S. congressional, agency and administration officials, and provided testimony on the importance of the free trade to the industry.

SEMI continues to educate policymakers about the critical importance of free and fair trade, open markets, and respect and enforcement of IP for all players in the global electronics manufacturing supply chain. As part of this initiative, we distributed “10 Principles for the Global Semiconductor Supply Chain in Modern Trade Agreements” and encouraged their adoption in various trade negotiations. These principles outline the primary considerations for balanced trade rules that benefit SEMI members around the world, strengthen innovation and perpetuate the societal benefits of affordable microelectronics.

Environment, Health and Safety

Environmental regulations are proliferating globally even as advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology relies increasingly on a host of new materials. With dozens of new fabs and fab line upgrades, our industry must align on best practices, sensibly respond to materials restrictions, and renew efforts toward sustainable manufacturing.

That’s why the revitalization of SEMI EHS efforts became another priority in 2018. Two months ago, we hosted the inaugural EHS Summit at SEMI Headquarters. Fully, 70 EHS professionals and company executives met to form the basis for the future SEMI EHS program.

The Year Ahead

Despite a softening in the market, compounded by Apple’s first-ever announcement of a revenue decline in 16 years, a geopolitical whirlwind on trade and an extended shutdown of much of the U.S. government, the future is bright.

At SEMI’s annual Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS 2019) in Half Moon Bay, Calif. in early January,  the sense of optimism was palpable. In her keynote address, Dr. Ann Kelleher, Sr. VP and General Manager, Technology and Manufacturing Group, at Intel, observed that data is powering the fourth industry revolution and the expansion of compute. With customers expecting continual improvements in applications, Kelleher highlighted the tremendous opportunity for the chip industry to meet these expectations.

At ISS 2019, we announced a Memorandum of Understand between SEMI and imec. The MOU will enable us to accelerate our members’ engagement in SEMI’s Smart vertical market platforms, in particular Smart MedTech and Smart Transportation. Our partnership with imec will also allow us to boost SEMI Standards activities in non-CMOS technologies, deepen technology roadmap efforts and augment our SEMI Think Tank initiative in thought leadership at a global level.

Over the course of this coming year, will we begin our global rollout of key building blocks of our comprehensive workforce development program to engage schoolchildren as young as 10 and learners all the way to veterans who return to the workforce. We are now able, with the invaluable help of our Workforce Development Council and the passionate engagement of many SEMI member companies, to offer a solution to the talent crisis in our industry.

We will continue to be the leading voice for our members and the end-to-end semiconductor supply chain across Talent, Trade, Tax and Technology as we work to ensure free, fair trade that protects IP while preserving vital access to markets to grow the supply chain.

Vertical Market Platforms

Our vertical market platforms are an important part of this growth. For example, in Smart MedTech, SEMI looks forward to working with the Nano-Bio Materials Consortium to advance human monitoring technology for telemedicine and digital health after winning $7 million to fund the renewed program. In Smart Transportation, we will leverage the Global Automotive Advisory Council (GAAC) we formed last year to represent the full automotive supply chain and the Smart Transportation and Smart Automotive forums featured at all our SEMICON events to enable the industry to identify and seize opportunities in autonomous driving.

At ISS 2019, Sujeet Chand of Rockwell Automation noted that “digitization will grow faster in the next 10 years than it did in the past 50,” a trend calling for semiconductor fab architectures that transform data into business value. We will continue to bring the industry together at our Smart Manufacturing venues to help uncover ways to deploy deep learning, edge computing and other Smart technologies to deliver this value and meet the challenges of automation as artificial intelligence’s (AI) sprawling influence reshapes industries including manufacturing.

I am filled with optimism and thrilled about the opportunities I see on the horizon for our members as we build on our 2018 accomplishments to enable your prosperity in 2019 and beyond. My heartfelt thanks to all of you for your participation in our programs and events.

I look forward to another successful year as we connect, collaborate and innovate together!

Ajit Manocha is president and CEO of SEMI. 

Soitec (Euronext Paris), a designer and manufacturer of semiconductor materials, announced today an expanded collaboration with Samsung Foundry to ensure the volume supply of fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) wafers. This agreement extends the current  partnership and provides a solid foundation for both companies to strengthen the FD-SOI supply chain and guarantee high-volume manufacturing for customers.

With the leadership from the two companies, today FD-SOI is one of the standard technologies for cost-effective, low-power devices used in high-volume consumer, 4G/5G smartphones, IoT, and automotive applications. The agreement is built on the existing close relationship between the companies and guarantees wafer supply for Samsung’s FD-SOI platform starting with 28FDS process.

“This strategic agreement validates today’s high-volume manufacturing adoption of FD-SOI,” said Christophe Maleville, Soitec’s Executive Vice President, Digital Electronics Business Unit. “Soitec is ready to support Samsung’s current and long-term growth for ultra-low power, performance-on-demand FD-SOI solutions.”

FD-SOI relies on a very unique substrate whose layer thickness is controlled at the atomic scale. FD-SOI offers remarkable transistor performance in terms of power, performance, area and cost tradeoffs (PPAC), making it possible to cover low-power to high-performance digital applications with a single technology platform. FD-SOI delivers numerous unique advantages including the ability to mitigate process, temperature, voltage and aging variations through body bias, near-threshold supply capability, ultra-low sensitivity to radiation, and very high intrinsic transistor speed, making it most likely the fastest RF-CMOS technology on the market.

“Samsung has been committed to delivering transformative industry leading technologies.  FD-SOI is currently setting a new standard in many high-growth applications including IoT with ultra-low-power devices, automotive systems such as vision processors for ADAS and infotainment, and mobile connectivity from 5G smartphones to wearable electronics,” said Ryan Lee, Vice President of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “Through this agreement with Soitec, our long-term strategic partner, we hope to lay the foundation for steady supply to meet high-volume demands of current and future customers.”