Soitec
More info
- Released
- 1992
- Type
- Engineered semiconductor substrates
A French company whose "Smart Cut" splits silicon into atom-thin layers — and that sits in the radio front-end of nearly every smartphone.
Soitec was founded in 1992 in Bernin, near Grenoble, as a spin-off from the research institute CEA-Leti. Its specialty is engineered substrates: using the Smart Cut technique, a thin silicon layer is cleaved off and transferred onto an insulator, yielding SOI (silicon-on-insulator) wafers.
SOI reduces leakage currents and parasitic capacitance, and Soitec's RF-SOI quickly became the standard in the radio front-end of mobile phones — the chips that connect the antenna to modern 4G/5G bands. The company is now expanding into substrates for silicon carbide and GaN. Unlike a plain wafer, a Soitec substrate is less a single crystal than a layer cake of materials.