July 2015 – At Semicon West in San Francisco, Leti summarized there current activities in the semiconductor and electronics arena. They had a total of six presentations lead off by their CEO Marie Semeria. Marie presented the high level view of the company including their innovation strategy. As a centralized research facility, partnership is support is the core of their activities. Their partnerships are split between short-term projects that have market actionable results and long term projects that are basic scientific and engineering research. The company also has a proud history of spinning out startups. The company highlighted 11 of the recent startups.
Leti Innovation Overview
On the semiconductor front, they had presentations on the 4 major areas of their research – Imaging, MEMS, Bio-Sensing and Silicon Photonics. To enable these technologies the foundational pieces include Advanced Logic, new Memories, Power, connectivity, basic lithography and imaging for manufacturing, applications of imaging technologies and culminating is the 3D integration research to help combine multiple semiconductor technologies into a single application.
The 3D integration program is focused on a technology called CoolCube. Cool Cube is a stacking and interconnect technology that can help address the manufacturing metrics of Moore’s law, without the cost and fundamental physics issues of pure device scaling. Adding in to the 3D integration activity, was their research in silicon photonics. The speed of data is at the point that the signal transfer time is a limiting factor, so being able to use light to transfer data is becoming a necessity. While there is long term research in place to be able to integrate the photonic elements directly with the electronics, until that time, they will continue to be built with separate technologies and then connected into a single package via 3D integration. Also on the 3D trend, was the effort in interposer technology to help speed the computing to memory interface and multi-core computer interconnection to accelerate computation. The applications that require HPC and Supercomputer class computing are increasing. More importantly, they are moving from academia and military applications to consumer and main stream business activities. With the world of data mining growing these tasks are becoming more common, and the need for low cost high performance computing is also growing.
Leti Technology Overview
The last two talks were on the changes in smart lighting and the integration with sensors to increase energy efficiency. The final talk was on the uses of imaging technology to perform nano-characterization. This is for materials, and biotechnology including medical imaging and characterization. The technologies presented are on the application side of shorter term research activity.