IN Brief:
- CEA-Leti and GlobalFoundries are extending more than two decades of FD-SOI collaboration.
- The FAMES Pilot Line will support RF, embedded memory, edge AI, biomedical, and secure component work.
- The programme strengthens Europe’s route from semiconductor research into manufacturable low-power platforms.
CEA-Leti and GlobalFoundries are extending their long-running collaboration on fully depleted silicon-on-insulator technology through the FAMES Pilot Line.
Funded by the European Commission and participating Member States under the Chips Joint Undertaking, FAMES is designed to accelerate early-stage research and development in advanced semiconductor technologies. The programme places energy efficiency, sustainability, and European technological resilience at the centre of its research agenda.
GlobalFoundries is participating as an end user of the pilot line’s early-stage research, with work focused on device enhancements and next-generation substrate concepts. That includes strained silicon concepts developed within FAMES and related programmes involving Soitec, aimed at extending the performance and energy efficiency of FD-SOI for future applications.
CEA-Leti and GF have worked together for more than two decades across partially depleted and fully depleted SOI technology generations. One commercial result of that collaboration is GF’s FDX platform, introduced in 2018 and developed at the company’s Dresden site.
Based on FD-SOI technology, GF’s 22FDX platform offers a balance of performance, power efficiency, cost, variability control, and radiation tolerance. Those characteristics make it suitable for automotive microcontrollers, satellite communications, edge AI, emerging computing architectures, and other applications where leakage, thermal limits, and lifecycle reliability can be as important as peak compute density.
FAMES extends that platform direction into a wider set of technology programmes. Beyond next-generation FDX devices, CEA-Leti and GF are using the pilot line to support RF design for 5G and 6G power amplifiers, embedded non-volatile memory for compute-in-memory at the edge, ultra-low-power biomedical wearables, cybersecure components, and future 3D heterogeneous integration.
The embedded memory work connects closely with wider movement around alternative memory technologies, including customer tape-outs using Weebit Nano ReRAM. Non-volatile memory is increasingly being treated as part of the system architecture rather than a passive storage block, particularly where low-power compute, AI inference, and secure operation have to sit close to the sensor or actuator.
CEA-Leti’s broader agenda around sustainable AI chips gives the FAMES work a further context. Semiconductor research is being pulled towards energy budgets, materials use, packaging complexity, and transfer into manufacturable processes, rather than being judged only by transistor performance in isolation.
FD-SOI occupies a useful position in that landscape. It is not a universal substitute for leading-edge FinFET or gate-all-around scaling, but it gives Europe a differentiated technology base for mixed-signal, RF, low-power, embedded, secure, and high-reliability applications. Those markets are often shaped by power, integration, cost, and lifecycle support rather than density alone.
By connecting research institutes, foundry capability, substrate innovation, and industrial end users, FAMES gives FD-SOI a route into the next generation of application-specific silicon. Europe’s chip strategy will need large fabs and advanced packaging, but it will also need platforms like this: specialised, energy-efficient, and close enough to production to survive beyond the laboratory.
