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Oct 31, 2006 at 05:03 PM |
 ARM has quickly added to its Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) activities after announcing a partnership with Soitec - the largest SOI wafer manufacturer - to develop IC cores specific to extracting the best from the SOI technology. ARM is now acquiring SOISIC, a Physical IP specialist in SOI designs that Soitec has previously invested in and is a spin-off from the Laboratoire d'Electronique de Technologie de l'Information (LETI).
"SOI technology is a leading candidate to address the power and performance scaling issues associated with traditional bulk CMOS processes as they migrate to ever-smaller geometries," said Mike Muller, CTO of ARM. "The acquisition of SOISIC adds a new capability to our physical IP portfolio offering the potential for significantly better optimization of performance and power consumption for our Partners."
SOISIC was privately owned and had net assets of approximately €250,000. ARM will retain SOISIC's offices in Grenoble, France and will use them as the new design center for the ARM family of ‘Artisan' Physical IP and SOI technology, adding local engineering support for ARM's European customer base, according to the company.
"Adding our SOI expertise to the broad array of ARM physical IP products will greatly expand the solution space for ARM Partners who push continually for both higher performance and lower power in a broad range of applications, including mobile, home and enterprise markets," said Jean-Luc Pelloie, managing director and CTO of SOISIC. "As process geometries continue to shrink, SOI technology will play a larger role in extracting the performance increases and power savings required to make these new-generation products economically viable."
A new report from Frost & Sullivan on the SOI market highlights the lack of IP designs available that would make SOI easy to integrate with standard CMOS processes. The lack of such an infrastructure as well as the perceived higher costs associated with SOI wafers has so far limited SOI adoption.
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