Executive Interview: Bami Bastani, SVP of RF Business Unit, GLOBALFOUNDRIES

Congratulations on your recent position as SVP of the RF Business. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has significantly broadened its RF offerings with RF SOI and SiGe technologies to go with the company’s existing high-voltage CMOS and RF MEMS technologies – what is unique about these offerings and how will it enable future RF applications?

Thank you. Coming to GLOBALFOUNDRIES is coming back to my semiconductor roots. Mobility plays a major role in the growth of our industry and leading the RF business—roughly a $1B enterprise including the RF portion of the IBM Microelectronics acquisition—is an exciting place to be. We now have the industry’s preeminent RF-SOI technology, which positions us well to take advantage of one of the hottest market segments. RF-SOI has taken the mobile RF world by storm in helping to solve the challenges that go along with ensuring users seamless, always available connectivity and access to the power of the Internet from virtually anywhere at any time.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES recently acquired IBM’s Microelectronics Division, how did that acquisition develop?

On July 1, 2015, GLOBALFOUNDRIES acquired IBM’s global commercial semiconductor business, which included its custom logic ASIC business, specialty foundry business, substantial intellectual property (including thousands of patents and technology expertise), and wafer fab facilities in East Fishkill, NY and Essex Junction, VT. Since then, we’ve integrated the IBM assets into the GLOBALFOUNDRIES portfolio, giving our customers access to a broad portfolio of differentiated offerings and design services capabilities. Our Essex Junction, “Fab 9”, is an innovative, state-of-the-art 200mm fab producing differentiated technologies in SiGe and RFSOI. These processes will be highly complementary to our existing mainstream technology offerings from our fabs in Singapore. East Fishkill “Fab 10” is an state of the art 300 mm automated fab supporting our advanced technologies for RFSOI addressing next generation RFSOI and 5G/mmWave requirements.

How has the integration of IBM’s Microelectronics Division fabs worked out and how are they positioned within GLOBALFOUNDRIES?

In RF technology, GLOBALFOUNDRIES now has the preeminent capacity to provide wireless front-end module solutions. IBM developed world-class capabilities in both RF silicon-on-insulator (RFSOI) and high-performance silicon-germanium (SiGe) technologies, which are highly complementary to GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ existing mainstream technology offerings. The acquisition also supports development of advanced fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FDSOI) technology, which can help deliver significantly lower power consumption in RF transceivers. With this combination of FDSOI for transceivers and RFSOI for front-end modules, GLOBALFOUNDRIES enables RF products like no other foundry in the world.

In March, GLOBALFOUNDRIES announced new SiGe-based PA Technology, the PAx family – can you tell us about the advantages of this new family and the applications most suited to use them?

GLOBALFOUNDRIES' 5PAx and 1K5PAx are the latest extensions to its family of SiGe-based PA technologies. The advanced offerings deliver optimized PA, LNA and switch technology with improved power efficiency, noise figure and insertion loss enabling customers to exploit optimized balance of performance, integration, and cost for faster data access and uninterrupted connections for next-generation wireless devices. 5PAx and 1K5PAx are optimized to meet the rigorous demands of evolving mobile standards like 802.11ac, which demands three times faster data throughput than the previous generation of wireless connectivity standards.

RF SOI technology has rapidly grown and matured for wireless applications, what are its main advantages compared to other technologies?

As a lower cost and more flexible alternative to GaAs, radio frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF SOI) has established itself as the technology of choice for the majority of RF switches and antenna tuners manufactured today. The mobile market continues to favor RF SOI as it helps to solve the challenges that go along with ensuring users seamless, always available connectivity and access to the power of the Internet from virtually anywhere. 

Recently, GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ RF business unit crossed a new capacity threshold with our RF SOI chip shipments topping 20 billion, proving industry demand is strong.

At the same time, interest in and usages of silicon germanium (SiGe) technologies are also growing.  SiGe technologies help address both the RF front-end module and high-performance market segments by offering excellent RF gain, noise, and linearity characteristics, even at millimeter wave frequencies.  SiGe enables customers to integrate more function into fewer chips while getting improved performance, and expand their addressable market segments.  Longer term, it is expected that foundry capacity will increase with the strong ramp in LTE smart phones, tablet PCs, and other mobile consumer applications.

What are the main RF applications that RF SOI has enabled and what are the primary markets for future growth?

Today, RFSOI is the clear technology choice in helping to solution complex cellular and Wi-Fi RF front ends for mobile applications.  We do not see this position changing as newer standards are introduced which will drive higher complexity and better performance.  The Internet of Things (IoT) is what will drive future growth – where everything is connected and all those devices are RF enabled – and this opportunity is integral to us at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Human appetite for data is infinite, but the spectrum is finite, and RF enables carriers to optimize the use of the spectrum. So not only at the consumer level, but at the carrier level our customers are beginning to work with us as we project toward the future, which is 5G.

With the growth of IoT and the emerging trials for 5G, there is no doubt that demand on our networks will continue to grow. Customers who exploit RF SOI and SiGe technologies develop solutions that enhance user experiences, including broader geographic mobility and faster data rates for the increasing interconnection of everyday applications.

How can RF designers benefit from FD-SOI (Fully-Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator) technology?

Technologies like FD-SOI have unique properties and capabilities that can enable RF circuit innovation, and achieve integration levels never before seen in silicon-based technologies. The key to this is the exploitation of the low voltage operating capability and well-bias features of FDSOI, dynamic control of Vdd and the use of well-bias techniques can not only help reduce overall power consumption but can be used as a means to optimize RF circuit operation. This is not something that can be easily done in bulk technologies.

When designing a complex SoC, another advantage is the ability to integrate multiple functionalities that results in a smaller form factor and simpler packaging which is much more cost-effective and in terms of power, more efficient for IoT applications, which is absolutely essential in order to meet the economic requirements of this market and keep pace with evolving network challenges.  Although emerging standards such as 5G are still a number of years away, we are already seeing interest in what advantages technologies such as FDSOI/RFSOI can bring in meeting the challenges of systems which need to deliver high speeds/bandwidth at low power.  Much depends on how the customer envisions the partitioning of the system.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES 22FDX™ platform has a cost-effective solution, with RF and analog on the same technology as digital. The planar transistors in the 22FDX technology have less variability than finFETs on a bulk silicon substrate, where the ability to control both the height and width of the fin is challenging. FD-SOI technology provides better transistor-matching characteristics. Because 22FDX is planar, with much lower variability that helps in building cleaner RF and analog alongside high-performance digital.

Can you tell us what other types of RF offerings GLOBALFOUNDRIES is able to offer and where you see future growth?

What’s coming next is another part of our exciting revolution in our industry – making 5G a reality in the next five years. We’ve reached the stage where the pipeline of 5G applications is well ahead of the standard, thus creating new business models and use cases.  Many of the use cases leveraged technologies such as virtual reality, location awareness services, and push advertising addressing applications like real-time gaming to autonomous vehicles,  just to name a few.

5G and IoT will both require innovations in radio technologies, which in turn will push advances in semiconductor technologies.  These innovations will include low power, integrated mmWave radio front ends, antenna phased array subsystems, high performance radio transceivers and high speed ADCs and DACs. As OEMs integrate more RF content into their smart phones and tablets and new high-speed network standards are introduced, the latest equipment requires additional RF circuitry to support newer modes of operation. This includes chips that support more LTE bands, carrier aggregation and envelope tracking. We are an industry recognized leader in the fast emerging 5G and mmWave markets with our 45RFSOI, and 130nm SiGe technologies.