Industrial Need of SOI

 Industrial Need of SOI

The implementation of SOI technology is one of several manufacturing strategies employed to allow the continued miniaturization of microelectronic devices, colloquially referred to as extending Moore's Law. Reported benefits of SOI technology relative to conventional silicon (bulk CMOS) processing include:

• Lower parasitic capacitance due to isolation from the bulk silicon, which improves power consumption at matched performance.
• Resistance to latchup due to complete isolation of the n- and p-well structures.
• Higher performance at equivalent VDD. Can work at low VDD's.
• Reduced temperature dependency due to no doping.
• Better yield due to high density, better wafer utilization.
• Reduced antenna issues
• No body or well taps are needed.
• Lower leakage currents due to isolation thus higher power efficiency.
• Inherently radiation hardened ( resistant to soft errors ), thus reducing the need for redundancy.

From a manufacturing perspective, SOI substrates are compatible with most conventional fabrication processes. In general, an SOI-based process may be implemented without special equipment or significant retooling of an existing factory. Among challenges unique to SOI are novel metrology requirements to account for the buried oxide layer and concerns about differential stress in the topmost silicon layer. The threshold voltage of the transistor depends on the history of operation and applied voltage to it, thus making modeling harder. The primary barrier to SOI implementation is the drastic increase in substrate cost, which contributes an estimated 10–15% increase to total manufacturing costs.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_insulator