French CEA-Leti Institute to Build FAMES FD-SOI Pilot Line

TapTechNews June 25th news, the French CEA-Leti Institute officially announced to take the lead in building the FAMES FD-SOI pilot line with the code name. The overall investment of this project amounts to 830 million euros (TapTechNews note: currently about 896.74 million US dollars).

The CEA-Leti Institute is an affiliated institution of the French Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy Commission and is the inventor of FD-SOI fully depleted绝缘体上硅.

FD-SOI is a planar CMOS technology that adopts a different technical route from the FinFET three-dimensional transistor popular in the advanced process field:

The FD-SOI process buries an ultra-thin oxide insulator on the top of the base silicon, reduces the parasitic capacitance between the source and the drain, and effectively limits the electrons flowing from the source to the drain, significantly reducing the leakage current effect that affects the performance.

FAMES is one of the four advanced semiconductor pilot line projects designated by the European chip consortium ChipJU, and other projects include the NanoIC sub-2nm process SoC pilot line led by imec in Belgium.

The FAMES FD-SOI pilot line will develop the following five new technologies:

FD-SOI process at the 10nm and 7nm process nodes;

Multiple eNVM embedded non-volatile storage, including OxRAM, FeRAM, MRAM, and FeFET;

Switches, filters, capacitors and other RF components;

Heterogeneous integration and sequential integration these two 3D integration processes;

Small inductors for DC-DC converters used in developing PMIC circuits.

These five technologies will create market opportunities for low-power MCUs, MPUs, cutting-edge AI/ML devices, RF devices, 5G/6G chips, automotive chips, intelligent sensors, etc.

The chief technology officer of CEA-Leti, Jean-René Léquèpeys, said:

By integrating and combining a series of cutting-edge technologies, the FAMES pilot line will open the door to disruptive SoC architectures and provide smarter, more environmentally friendly and more efficient solutions for future chips.

FAMES project will pay special attention to the sustainable development challenges of semiconductors.

CEA-Leti stated that the FAMES FD-SOI pilot line project has received the support of at least 43 electronic system value chain enterprises, and partners will include imec in Belgium, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Promotion Association and other important research institutions in many European countries.