A Mutricy is from Global Foundries and he said that his company is still working on FinFET technology for applications that need a lot of computing. Devices are converging towards very low cost and low power devices.
FDSOI tools are now available although, of course, initially they were not there. The technology can get feature details to 7 nanometres which uses much less power than 12 micron FinFet. Customers are designing new chips using this level of technology.
GlobalFoundries said that they can get down to such low power consumption and that devices can be designed now that will run for ten years on battery only. That’s particularly good for medical applications (and small size helps as well) The feature could also be good for wearables, such as smartwatches.
At this point there were quite a lot of detailed technical discussions on the complexity of transistor design, but it was beyond the pay grade of your reporter!
Mutricy said that there could be two different semiconductor roadmaps – one for FinFET and one for FDSOI – which can go down to 12 micron and that will cover the next few years. Although FinFET will be good for high performance, FDSOI could be very helpful for other lower cost and lower power applications.
At the moment a lot of the silicon area is used in just 3% or 4% of applications, so spreading that out could be interesting.
