Feature: SOI & Design (ARM, Synopsys, Mentor, IBM)
Business & Technology (GSA/SOI Consortium survey, Yole, Soitec, Mattson, Raytheon, ST)
Special Supplement: SOI Industry Consortium news
Industry Buzz (ST & Debiotech, Intel, Hitachi & Renesas, Atmel, AMD, Toshiba, IBM, Rambus, Honeywell, Semico and more.)

(Courtesy of ARM, IBM, and Soitec, August 2007)
It's ideal for a broad set of applictions
Mobile devices, where:
lower dynamic power reduces the overall operating power for graphic-intensive mobile applications;
RF design can strongly benefit from SOI substrate isolation and passive component enhancement;
application processors target higher performance in tighter power envelopes for the next digital mobile experience.
Consumer electronics and gaming, where:
smaller form factors are key;
better thermal management is required;
performance gains can simplify system designs.
Embedded markets, where:
the emphasis is on performance, size, power and reliability especially under challenging conditions as found in automotive, industrial, and medical markets.
Dataprocessing including graphics and storage, where:
SOI is intended to enable higher system performance, more cache memory, and better power envelope management, leading to cheaper packaging solutions.
By Christine Raynaud, CEA-LETI / STMicroelectronics
For RF applications, SOI offers key advantages over bulk. It provides the ability to meet very low voltage and low noise applications, allows for improvement of passive devices and improves integration capabilities to reduce cost. This short course details the considerations for RF design with SOI.