ARM acquires SOISIC

The privately-owned company has offices in Grenoble, France and Santa Clara, California and has net assets of approximately Euros 250,000. The Grenoble office will become a new design center for the ARM® family of Artisan® Physical IP and SOI technology, adding local engineering support for ARM's European customer base. “SOI technology is a leading candidate to address the power and performance scaling issues associated with traditional bulk CMOS processes as they migrate to ever-smaller geometries," said Mike Muller, CTO, ARM. “The acquisition of SOISIC adds a new capability to our physical IP portfolio offering the potential for significantly better optimization of performance and power consumption for our Partners." SOISIC develops standard cell libraries, embedded SRAM memory compilers and I/Os in SOI technologies, enabling the benefits of SOI to expand beyond full custom-designed ICs into the mainstream SoC market, where more automated standard cell-based design methodologies are widely deployed. SOISIC's expertise derives from detailed understanding of the unique benefits of SOI process technology and the application of this technology in products it has developed from 250nm down to 90nm. “Adding our SOI expertise to the broad array of ARM physical IP products will greatly expand the solution space for ARM Partners who push continually for both higher performance and lower power in a broad range of applications, including mobile, home and enterprise markets," said Jean-Luc Pelloie, managing director and CTO of SOISIC. “As process geometries continue to shrink, SOI technology will play a larger role in extracting the performance increases and power savings required to make these new-generation products economically viable."