Fully depleted Silicon on Insulator helps ST to hit 3GHz clock speed

STMicroelectronics reaps high speed clock capability up to 3 GHz in its SoC chip made using 28nm Fully depleted Silicon on Insulator (FD-SOI) Technology Platform. ST has announced that its application-processor engine devices manufactured at the Company’s Crolles, France fab, were capable of operating at 3GHz with even greater power efficiency at a given operating frequency than alternate technologies. The clock matters a lot in smart phones where the huge data need to be crunched faster. This achievement helps ST to deliver high speed mobile device SoC to its customers. ST can leverage FD-SOI technology as a competitive advantage over its customers. “As we had anticipated, FD-SOI is proving to be fast, simple and cool; we had fully expected to see 3GHz operating speeds, the design approach is very consistent with what we had been doing in bulk CMOS, and, with the benefits of fully depleted channels and back biasing, the low-power requirements are also meeting our expectations,” said Jean-Marc Chery, Executive Vice President, General Manager Digital Sector, and Chief Technology and Manufacturing Officer of STMicroelectronics. ST has found porting Libraries and Physical IPs from 28nm Bulk CMOS to 28nm FD-SOI to be straightforward, and the process of designing digital SoCs with conventional CAD tools and methods in FD-SOI to be identical to Bulk, due to the absence of M...