STMicroelectronics has announced the achievement of another major milestone in its testing of its 28nm FD-SOI Technology Platform. Following the Company’s December announcement of the successful manufacturing of System on Chip (SoC) integrated circuits, ST announced that application-processor engine devices manufactured at the Company’s Crolles, France fab, were capable of operating at 3GHz with even greater power efficiency at a given operating frequency than alternate technologies.
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This announcement follows on the heels of recent announcements from other organizations to utilize FD-SOI technologies. Moore’s Law-the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubled about every two years—has driven the semiconductor industry over the past 50 years to shrink the size of the transistors, which are essentially miniature on/off switches. The increased density from these size reductions have given consumers the explosion of new and more exciting features at lower-cost that we’ve come to expect. In parallel, these new features are able to operate at clock speeds that allow the phones to respond to your commands—by keypad, touchpad, and now voice-almost before you finish expressing the command.
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 “As we had anticipated, FD-SOI is proving to be fast, simple and cool; we had fully expected to see 3GHz operating speeds, the design approach is very consistent with what we had been doing in bulk CMOS, and, with the benefits of fully depleted channels and back biasing, the low-power requirements are also meeting our expectations,” said Jean-Marc Chery, Executive Vice President, General Manager Digital Sector, and Chief Technology and Manufacturing Officer of STMicroelectronics.
