Leti and Soitec announce substrate collaboration
Leti, a research institute of CEA Tech, and Soitec, a designer and manufacturer of innovative semiconductor materials, have announced a new collaboration and five-year partnership to drive the R&D of advanced engineered substrates, including SOI and beyond.
This agreement brings the traditional Leti-Soitec partnership to a new dimension and includes the launch of a world-class prototyping hub associating equipment partners to pioneer with new materials, The Substrate Innovation Centre will feature access to shared Leti-Soitec expertise around a focused pilot line. Key benefits for partners include access to early exploratory sampling and prototyping, collaborative analysis, and early learning at the substrate level, eventually leading to streamlined product viability and roadmap planning at the system level.
Chip makers and foundries worldwide use Soitec products to manufacture chips for consumer applications targeting performance, connectivity, and efficiency with extremely low energy consumption. Applications include smart phones, data centres, automotive, imagers, and medical and industrial equipment, but this list is always growing, along with the need for flexibility to explore new applications starting at the substrate level.
At the Substrate Innovation Centre, located on Leti's campus in Grenoble, France, Leti and Soitec engineers will explore and develop innovative substrate features, expanding to new fields and applications with a special focus on 4G/5G connectivity, artificial intelligence, sensors and display, automotive, photonics, and edge computing.
"¨"Material innovation and substrate engineering make entire new horizons possible. The Substrate Innovation Centre will unleash the power of substrate R&D collaboration beyond the typical product road maps, beyond the typical constraints," said Paul Boudre, Soitec CEO."The Substrate Innovation Centre is a one-of-a-kind opportunity open to all industry partners within the semiconductor value chain.""¨ "¨
Whereas a typical manufacturing facility has limited flexibility to try new solutions and cannot afford to take risks with prototyping, the mission of the Substrate Innovation Centre is to become the world's preferred hub for evaluating and designing engineered substrate solutions to address the future needs of the industry, inclusive of all the key players, from compound suppliers to product designers.
Using state of the art, quality-controlled clean room facilities, and the latest industry-grade equipment and materials, Leti and Soitec engineers will conduct testing and evaluation at all levels of advanced substrate R&D. "¨"Leti and Soitec's collaboration on SOI and differentiated materials, which extends back to Soitec's launch in 1992, has produced innovative technologies that are vital to a wide range of consumer and industrial products and components," said Emmanuel Sabonnadière, Leti CEO. "This new common hub at Leti's campus marks the next step in this ongoing partnership. By jointly working with foundries, fabless, and system companies, we provide our partners with a strong edge for their future products."
