<font color=red>Silicon-on-insulator
may be getting 'legit'
Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology may become a mainstream process after all. Even Intel may be changing its mind.
This was the buzz this week at the Microprocessor Forum, where Motorola unveiled a G4 PowerPC design ported to a 0.18-micron SOI process and Intel engineers may support SOI technology for making mobile processors and communications ICs.
Intel is "looking pretty hard at SOI right now," acknowledges strategic planning manager Bob Jackson, primarily because it would reduce junction leakage.
Motorola joins a growing group of major chip companies that are turning to SOI both for performance and power-saving designs. They include Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, and Samsung.
Using SOI will give either a 22% performance boost or a 30% reduction in power compared with bulk silicon, says David Bearden, leader of the Motorola team that designed the new SOI Apollo processor.
Until now, Intel had publicly dismissed SOI, arguing that its advantages would disappear as standard technology scales to 100-nm CMOS and beyond. Last June, the MPU giant reported it had investigated SOI thoroughly and concluded silicon would serve its needs for performance and cost.
But it turns out that an Intel process technology research group has been taking a fresh look at SOI and it could recommend an SOI-based process for Intel products where power consumption is critical.
Intel may be feeling competitive heat from AMD, which is expected to apply a Motorola-AMD SOI process to its Hammer series of 64-bit processors. At a conference two weeks ago, an Intel engineer indicated that if AMD was to come to market with products that gained a competitive advantage from SOI, Intel would be in a position to respond quickly.
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But it won't be an easy task. SOI presents subtle design challenges that could take years to figure out, says Mark Papermaster, who heads up the Power4 design effort at IBM's Austin design center. IBM is in its third generation of using SOI for PowerPC-based designs, he notes.
(See Oct. 13 story.)
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