SOI technology for the GHz era

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS offers a 20–35% performance gain over bulk CMOS. High-performance microprocessors using SOI CMOS have been commercially available since 1998. As the technology moves to the 0.13-µm generation, SOI is being used by more companies, and its application is spreading to lower-end microprocessors and SRAMs. In this paper, after giving a short history of SOI in IBM, we describe the reasons for performance improvement with SOI, and its scalability to the 0.1-µm generation and beyond. Some of the recent applications of SOI in high-end microprocessors and its upcoming uses in low-power, radio-frequency (rf) CMOS, embedded DRAM (EDRAM), and the integration of vertical SiGe bipolar devices on SOI are described. As we move to the 0.1-µm generation and beyond, SOI is expected to be the technology of choice for system-on-a-chip applications which require high-performance CMOS, low-power, embedded memory, and bipolar devices.