STMicroelectronics has announced that one of its team and CEA-Leti researchers has received the 2012 Général Ferrié Award. This award is considered as the highest award in electronics R&D in France. The award honors an engineer or a scientific team whose work has made a significant contribution to the progress of electronics and its applications.
The team members were Claire Fenouillet-Béranger and Olivier Faynot from Leti, and Stéphane Monfray and Frédéric Bœuf from ST. They were honored for their work on FD-SOI (Fully Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator) technology, which is a major technological breakthrough in the pursuit of miniaturization of electronic circuits.
Since the beginning of the 1960s, the chip industry’s efforts to meet the growing demand for computing power have followed Moore’s Law, which recognized that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.
Over time, the idea of making transistors on a substrate of ultra-thin silicon resting on an insulator was developed as an alternative to making transistors on thicker silicon without the insulator. The result was Fully Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI). This planar technology uses manufacturing processes that are already in place for conventional technologies. Other approaches, including one called FinFET, require disruptive changes to design techniques and process technologies because it relies on 3-D transistors.
“This award acknowledges more than 20 years of Leti’s R&D work on SOI,” said Laurent Malier, CEO of Leti. “Leti is very proud to have succeeded in developing this technology through to the industrial level and to have made it an excellent candidate for components that are being integrated into mobile devices for the ideal compromise they allow between speed and power consumption,” Laurent added.
