CEA-Leti Leading: Interview with CEO Emmanuel Sabonnadiere

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R&D powerhouse CEA-Leti plays a major role in the SOI ecosystem. The next Leti Innovation Days (LID) conference is coming up soon (June-22-26). We had a chance recently to catch up with CEO Emmanuel Sabonnadière, who shares his outlook.

soiconsortium.org, Mar. 17, 2020 – 

Advanced Substrate News (ASN): Can you tell us about your vision for SOI at CEA-Leti?

Emmanuel Sabonnadière (ES): CEA-Leti wants to be a beacon for the More-than-Moore segment of the business. In the semicon world, most of the production is in Asia, most of the IP is in the US, but in fact most of the big R&D centers are in Europe. For Europe, it makes a lot of sense for the three big RTOs – CEA-Leti, imec and Fraunhofer – to collaborate. We have MOUs with Fraunhofer and imec, and they have signed collaboration agreements with each other, too. So imec is more FinFET, and we are more SOI, and on the memory side, they are more standalone, we are more embedded. Fraunhofer is especially good at packaging and integration. Together, we can tackle serious challenges. In particular, there are two we want to target: quantum computing on silicon and edge AI – which are SOI. CEA-Leti and imec signed a specific MOU on these subjects. The three of us are well supported by the European Commission because they highly value what our work represents for Europe.

All we do is for the benefit of the big players in the semiconductor ecosystem but also the start-ups. And, of course, we are helping to highly promote FD-SOI in China.

CEA-Leti really launched it all with the invention of Smart Cut™ wafer production technology, and we continue to support Soitec in advanced development.

In FD-SOI, you have 5G. But the next wave is edge AI, and that wave is probably even bigger.

ASN: What is CEA-Leti's role in driving FD-SOI in edge AI?

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