SOI technology for the GHz era

Silicon on Insulator (SOI) CMOS offers 20-35% performance gain over bulk CMOS. High performance microprocessors using SOI CMOS have been shipping since 1998. As we move to 0.13 μm generation, it will be used by more companies, and spread to lower-end microprocessors and SRAMs. In this paper, after a short history of SOI in IBM, we will describe causes of performance gain on SOI, and its scalability to 0.1 μm generation and beyond. Some of the recent applications of SOI in high-end microprocessors will be described. It is fully expected that as we move to 0.1 μm and beyond, SOI is the technology of choice for applications which require high performance, and/or low power