Project Title: ”Opportunity to Carry European Autonomous driviNg further with FDSOI technology up to 12nm node”

Acronym: OCEAN12

Project Type: H2020 European Project

OCEAN12 is a major “Opportunity to Carry European Autonomous driving further with FDSOI technology up to 12nm node” and leverage Europe leadership on Automotive and aeronautics applications.

OCEAN12 aims to bring concrete technological solutions and corresponding demonstrators to the key societal challenge of Smart mobility.

Since the last few years, electronic components become more and more prevalent in the automotive industry. Today they create a superior value for the final customer and represent an important vector of differentiation in this industry. The share economy model, which drives innovation strategies in Smart mobility, will further increase the need for safe, cost efficient, secure, reliable and unhackable operations, raising logically the proportion of electronics and software as a percentage of the total cost of a vehicle.

Based on the innovative FDSOI technology, OCEAN12 will develop new processors and applications designs that leverage Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FD-SOI) technology to offer the industry’s lowest power consuming processor and components, especially for automotive and aeronautic applications.

By securing a FDSOI roadmap beyond the 22FDX it highlights Europe unique strategic position on the FDSOI technology and is fully involved in the dynamic of European microelectronics manufacturing ecosystem.

The disruptive FDSOI (fully depleted silicon on insulator) technology platform rooted in Europe is a strong differentiating platform for the logic, mixed-signal and RF SoC components. The FDSOI technology platform profits from the design’s extreme low leakage and operating voltage (Vdd) scalability reachable thanks to reverse and forward body biasing (RBB/FBB) of the integrated circuit and its power system architecture. This architectural flexibility due to devices and high performance will enable the next strategic generations of smart vehicles with low-power.

On the one hand, FDSOI is the only technology platform keeping the planar transistor devices alive. Due to the fact that the change from the bulk to the fully depleted construction of the devices brings a superior control of the channel again, this technology is able to step on scaling the dimensions further at lower complexity in comparison to FinFET-technologies. Thus FDSOI is the only way to keep Moore’s law alive at least for another two generations.

The goal of OCEAN12 is to expand the FDSOI technology platform to 12FDX and prove that this is the right CMOS solution to enable low power next generation strategic components, thereby ensuring European leadership in the following 4 key technology pillars:

  • FDSOI substrate pilot line in Soitec, enabling 12FDX node and answering the requirements of future embedded SoC with analog / mixed-signal IP containing large proportion digital components.
  • 28FDSOI, 22FDX and 12FDX MPW prototyping to answer ultra-low power system requirements in SoCs.
  • Development of ultra-low power, very reliable and high performance sensors, analog/mixed signal and digital IP and SOCs (Camera, sensors, high performance computing) with minimized form factor thanks to FDSOI technology, enabling always-on applications inside and outside the vehicle for the targeted automotive use-case.

Leverage on the strong European FDSOI eco-system created, thanks to THINGS2DO project, in IP, EDA and application in order to push further dissemination of the technology in new application domains