SOITEC

Soitec and KOKUSAI ELECTRIC CORPORATION expand their strategic technology partnership through R&D collaboration at Substrate Innovation Center

Soitec and KOKUSAI ELECTRIC CORPORATION expand their strategic technology partnership through R&D collaboration at Substrate Innovation Center 

Engineered substrates bring disruptive solutions at device and system level beyond traditional CMOS scaling

San Francisco, USA (Semicon West), July 8th, 2019 - Soitec (Euronext Paris), an industry leader in designing and manufacturing innovative semiconductor materials, and KOKUSAI ELECTRIC CORPORATION ("KOKUSAI"), a world leader in designing and manufacturing processing equipment for thermal treatment and thin-film solutions, announced today that they have expanded their collaboration to R&D activities at Grenoble's Substrate Innovation Center (France). Launched by CEA-Leti and Soitec, the Substrate Innovation Center is an industry-inclusive hub that promotes early collaboration as well as learning from substrate to system level and drives the R&D of advanced engineered substrates, including SOI and beyond.

Installing dedicated R&D capabilities at the Substrate Innovation Center will allow partners to test new materials and to seek further improvements of atomic-level thickness uniformity and surface-roughness for the next generation of engineered substrates.

"We are expanding our long-term partnership with KOKUSAI which started with the development of disruptive solutions for wafer-roughness control in high-volume manufacturing for FD-SOI wafers, to collaboration on new generation of engineered substrates", said Christophe Maleville, CTO of Soitec. "KOKUSAI brings unique expertise in thermal treatment and layer formation processes which are essential in building next generations substrates for semiconductor devices".

"By collaborating with Soitec on optimizing their SOI processes in high-volume manufacturing, we have extended our breadth of expertise and further expanded our process capabilities", said Dr. Unryu Ogawa, Senior Vice President and Executive Officer of KOKUSAI ELECTRIC CORPORATION. "Working in an R&D environment on high volume manufacturing ready tools will allow successful process transfers to be less complex and much shorter".

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About Soitec

Soitec (Euronext Paris) is an industry leader in designing and manufacturing innovative semiconductor materials. The company uses its unique technologies and semiconductor expertise to serve the electronics markets. With more than 3,500 patents worldwide, Soitec's strategy is based on disruptive innovation to answer its customers' needs for high performance, energy efficiency and cost competitiveness. Soitec has manufacturing facilities, R&D centers and offices in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.