Chinese foundries adopting FD-SOI to compete with FinFET

DigiTimes reports the Chinese chip wafer foundry firms in China are focusing on Fully Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator (FD-SOI) as a competitor to the FinFET technology adopted by TSMC and Intel. The site says this process technology will primarily be used for smaller chip orders for low to medium-priced chips, the other end of the spectrum (high-priced, high-performance, high-volume) will more likely be produced at FinFET fabs.

FD-SOI is characterized by lower forward voltage and operating voltage requirements and also more power saving. Meanwhile, the operating cost of FD-SOI per circuit is lower than that of FinFET.

However, the FD-SOI process has not been scaling down as well as FinFET, and the transistor density of FD-SOI is also lower than that of FinFET, Digitimes Research noted.

Current advocates for the FD-SOI process include Globalfoundries, Samsung Semiconductor and STMicroelectronics. China-based HH Grace Semiconductor is also expected to join the FD-SOI camp.