Semiconductor manufacturers and equipment suppliers, smartphone and PC market saturation, can not drive sales growth, the traditional practices of the past, the production of more powerful chips, it is difficult to expect to reverse the decline, and now the industry to adopt new technologies, such as fully depleted coated silicon (FD-SOI) and 3DNAND on type insulation.
The Wall Street Journal reported that performance pressure faced by the semiconductor industry and has led the whole trend, the latest data also pointed out that this year the global semiconductor equipment manufacturer revenue is probably grow by only 1 percent to $ 36.94 billion, while the wafer revenue may decline 2.4 percent, bad is wisdom slowing the growth of the mobile phone, PC market is shrinking. The semiconductor industry are asking: Where is the next growth opportunity?
Today, many operators have adopted new materials and new production technologies to cope with changes in the market, these industry optimistic about the networking device needs, but things wafer demand is not the same as asking wafer costs at less than $ 1, and can be run for several years, not need to replace the battery.
GlobalFoundries (GlobalFoundries) and rival Samsung Electronics has adopted known as FD-SOI technology, this technology has advantages in power consumption and cost, rely on semiconductor wafers French manufacturer Soitec specially tailored.
Soitec CEO Bourdelle said the Japanese technology giant Sony recently designed smart phone GPS chips will use FD-SOI technology, power consumption is only one-tenth of the results of the wafer original wafer, allowing users to more frequent use of satellite positioning technology, Do not worry too much electricity will eat your phone.
Some in the industry have not started production of smaller transistors, the further tap the potential of the wafer, NAND flash memory manufacturers have to 3DNAND way through the stacked multilayer circuit to enhance performance. This technique requires a lot of production and procurement of equipment, and therefore so many companies can benefit, Applied Materials (AppliedMaterials) is one of them.
Coated silicon (FullyDepletedSilicon-on-Insular, FD-SOI) is on a full depletion type insulated fin field effect transistor (FinFET) and Three gate transistor architecture (Tri-Gate) of complementary technologies, it can be regarded as look at things with the car market substituted FinFET ideal alternative, which features low power consumption, better performance and cost effectiveness. Currently supports FD-SOI wafer foundries include GlobalFoundries and Samsung Electronics.
