Soitec and ZenSemi partner to mass-produce 300 mm BCD-on-SOI power ICs

Soitec and ZenSemi have formed a strategic collaboration to bring 300 mm BCD-on-SOI (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS on Silicon-on-Insulator) technology into high-volume production for power electronics. Soitec will supply its 300 mm Power-SOI substrates to ZenSemi, a specialty foundry in China, which is developing and ramping a new BCD-on-SOI process on top of them.

By combining Soitec’s engineered substrates and ZenSemi’s foundry capacity, the partners aim to offer fabless chip companies and integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) a manufacturing platform for power ICs.

The BCD-on-SOI process involves building the power stage, analog and digital logic of a power IC on a silicon-on-insulator wafer rather than on bulk silicon. The full dielectric isolation that SOI provides eliminates parasitic latch-up and cuts electrical crosstalk between devices, which lets high-voltage power stages and sensitive low-voltage control circuitry sit together densely on a single chip. Soitec says the result is a more reliable, power-dense platform suited to the functional safety (FuSa) requirements of automotive and robotics designs.

The two companies are aiming the process at power distribution for AI data centers, automotive and robotics systems that must meet FuSa standards, and battery management systems for electric vehicles and energy storage. ZenSemi says first-silicon validation with a lead customer showed that an 18-channel analog front-end (AFE) device built on its SOI process was around 30% smaller than the same part on a traditional bulk BCD process.

ZenSemi operates a 300 mm fab in Guangzhou built for MEMS and CMOS production, and its foundry portfolio already spans MEMS, embedded non-volatile memory and BCD processes, including BCD-on-SOI.

“Once our platforms move into full-volume production, we will empower both domestic Chinese design houses and worldwide clients to build smaller, more robust, cost-optimized power ICs,” said Ruby Yan, ZenSemi’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing.

Source: Soitec