Soitec and Shin-Etsu Handotai Co. said this week they have agreed on a Smart Cut licensing extension and have expanded their technology cooperation including a 10-year licensing agreement between the two companies and establishing a new level of joint technology cooperation.

The expanded partnership is meant to facilitate the development and wafer supply of silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers to meet major market opportunities such as SOI for RF devices, FinFETs on SOI and fully depleted (FD) planar circuits, the companies said in a statement. They both expect to be able to increase global output of SOI wafers at a time when demand in the electronics industry is surging due to the increase in mobile and embedded computing devices in the consumer market.

This partnership is meant to be a major step forward in the supply chain and ecosystem with the goal of enabling the next generation of technologies on an optimized SOI wafer from two independent suppliers collaborating at the R&D level as well as accelerating time to market for breakthroughs at a material level.

In terms of Soitec’s Smart Cut technology, the agreement is a licensing extension that expands the scope of the partnership between Soitec and SEH, including cross-licensing Smart Cut related patents between the two companies.

As a result, SEH will continue to use Soitec’s industry-defining Smart Cut technology to manufacture SOI wafers, and now will be able to extend its Smart Cut manufacturing capabilities to other materials, a trend commonly referred to as Silicon on Anything or SOA (any material on top of which there is a thin film of plain silicon), which will allow SEH to further expand its scope of applications, the companies said.

Tags: fully-depleted SOI, Shin-Etsu Handotai, silicon on insulator, Soitec

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