What is going on with SOI technology

Implications: The article trying to show on a positive note that they are forming a consortium to encourage other semiconductor manufacturing to increase the adopting rate of SOI technology. However the fact is that the usage is not growing and SOI is still a niche application and will stay like that for a while.

Analysis: SOI technology has been around for over 30 years as a great idea that has been always an idea for the future. Late '90 IBM came with new approach and decided to bring the SOI (Silicon on Insulator) technology to the main stream of semiconductor manufacturing.
The move was a bold move that was taken by surprise with most semiconductor manufacturing. The use of SOI wafers (the raw material that the chip is built on) and the technology have been very slow to be adapted by other manufacturers.
As of today only IBM and AMD are using it in a large-scale manufacturing.
The reason why the consortium was formed is to bring back the excitement to the technical community in order to increase the awareness of the technology.
One of the key issues of using SOI wafers is the cost of the raw wafers themselves compares to the standard Silicon wafers. Also when a device is built on SOI wafers there are some major changes that needed to be done on the design side as well as on the manufacturing process.
But the bottom line is that the end results of using SOI wafers don’t improve the device performance substantially to justify all the extra cost and process and design changes.