Always-On IoT - FDSOI's Always Better? What About Wafers? (Questions from Shanghai)

By SemiWiki

November 3, 2016

Mahesh Tirupattur, EVP at low-power SERDES pioneer Analog Bits lead off the panel discussion at the recent FD-SOI Forum in Shanghai with the assertion that for anything “always on” in IoT, FD-SOI’s always better. They had a great experience porting their SERDES IP to 28nm FD-SOI (which they detailed last spring – see the ppt here). The port from 28 bulk to 28 FDSOI took 2 1/2 months (vs. to FinFET, which took almost 6). Even without using body bias, they got performance up by around 15% and leakage down by about 30% (he added that with body bias, they could get five times that).

He compared porting to FD-SOI to playing high school ball, vs. a port to FinFET which is like competing in the Olympics. ESD was different, but not a big deal – you just need to “read the manual”. Heating? Nothing an engineer can’t resolve. For IoT, FinFETs are like using a cannon to shoot a mosquito, he quipped.

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