RF SOI

Having dropped out of the race for leading-edge manufacturing technologies in order to focus on specialty fabrication processes, GlobalFoundries has pinned some big hopes in manufacturing RF-SOI chips for various 5G applications, as well as FD-SOI chips for low-power devices. This week the company signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with GlobalWafers Co. (GWC) to develop a long-term supply contract for 300 mm SOI wafers, GloFo's second long-term SOI wafers supply agreement (WSA) in less than a year. Once primarily used to build leading-edge processors, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology is used today for a wide variety of applications, including those that need an ultra-low power consumption (SoCs and MCUs for IoT applications), high voltages (analog/mixed signal), or high resistivity (4G and 5G front-end modules [FEMs] for...