en.Wedoany.com Reported - CEA-Leti, Europe's leading microelectronics research institute, announced the deepening of its long-term collaboration with GlobalFoundries. GlobalFoundries' participation as an end user in the FAMES pilot line marks a new phase in their more than two decades of partnership in fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) technology, aiming to strengthen Europe's position in energy-efficient autonomous semiconductors. Funded by the European Commission and participating member states through the European Chips Joint Undertaking (Chips JU), FAMES is dedicated to accelerating early-stage research on next-generation FD-SOI.
The FAMES pilot line focuses on energy efficiency, sustainability, and European technological resilience, aiming to accelerate early-stage R&D of advanced semiconductor technologies. Industrial participation is seen as key to ensuring that R&D activities align with real-world application needs. CEA-Leti and GlobalFoundries have collaborated on PD-SOI and FD-SOI technologies for over two decades, spanning multiple technology generations. This long-term partnership has driven FD-SOI to maturity, making it a differentiated technology solution for applications seeking a balance between performance, energy efficiency, and cost.
One outcome of this collaboration is the GlobalFoundries FDX platform based on FD-SOI technology, developed at the Germany Dresden factory in 2018. The GlobalFoundries 22FDX process delivers performance comparable to 14/16nm FinFET nodes across numerous workloads, while achieving lower power consumption and inherent radiation hardness. These features are suitable for a wide range of applications, including mobile and consumer devices, automotive microcontrollers, satellite communications, edge AI, and emerging computing architectures. FD-SOI technology has also been deployed in space and other high-reliability environments where energy efficiency, variability control, and robustness are critical.
GlobalFoundries' participation as an end user in early-stage research within the FAMES pilot line aims to drive FD-SOI performance improvements. The collaboration includes exploratory work on device enhancements and joint efforts on next-generation substrate innovations, encompassing strained silicon concepts developed within the FAMES framework and related projects involving Soitec.
CEA-Leti CEO Sébastien Dauvé stated that the FAMES pilot line is a cornerstone of Europe's strategy to strengthen semiconductor research and innovation. By joining forces, early-stage FD-SOI research can be accelerated while maintaining a focus on long-term innovation, sustainability, and European technological sovereignty. Beyond next-generation FDX devices, the partners are leveraging the FAMES pilot line to advance broader projects, including RF designs for 5G/6G power amplifiers, embedded non-volatile memory for in-memory computing in edge AI, ultra-low-power biomedical wearable devices, and cybersecurity components. GlobalFoundries and CEA-Leti view FAMES as a natural pathway toward 3D heterogeneous integration for future FDX generations, further consolidating FD-SOI's versatility as a European sovereign energy-efficient silicon platform. Manfred Horstmann, General Manager and Senior Vice President at GlobalFoundries, stated that the company's role as an end user in the FAMES pilot line reflects its interest in early-stage FD-SOI research and its support for the European semiconductor research ecosystem. FD-SOI is widely regarded as a European-led technology, built through sustained collaboration between research institutions and industry, and initiatives like FAMES continue to drive the foundational technologies underpinning long-term competitiveness and energy-efficient computing.
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