Both Silicon on Insulator (SOI) wafer and large-scale silicon wafer build the foundation for integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing. In particular, SOI technology has been renowned as “the silicon integrated circuit technology in the 21st century” for its applications in high speed, low power consumption circuits, high temperature resistant circuits, micro-mechanical sensors and photoelectric integration. Moreover, SOI technology is a key technology for its advantage of radiation resistance and has important strategic significance in national security and aerospace.

In the 1980s, SIMIT was the first to conduct the research on SOI materials and devices and continues to take the lead in China. SIMIT has gradually overcome the foundation of SOI technology since then, and incubated the sole SOI manufacturing base named as Shanghai Simgui Technology Co. Ltd. in 2001, and realized the industrialization of SOI technology. In 2006, SIMIT was awarded the first Prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award for research and industrialization of high-class silicon based SOI materials. In 2007, the SOI research group received the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award. As the development of SOI technology, the Simgui products have covered most of the application areas of SOI, and the product quality and technical capability are recognized by world-famous companies. Currently, more than 90 percent of the Simgui products are sold to America, Japan, Europe, Russia, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and Simgui has become a supplier of NXP, TOSHIBA, Global Foundries, Vanguard, Hitachi, CSMC and Mellanox. In 2014, Simgui reached a strategic cooperation agreement with Soitec and initiated international industrial cooperation. In 2015, Simgui successfully prepared the first batch of 8-inch SOI wafers by smart-cut technology with the cooperation of Soitec.

As the rapid development of integrated circuits, the smaller feature size stimulates a greater demand on SOI wafers. Aiming at the demand of fully depleted SOI (FDSOI) materials, SIMIT developed Simsplit technology with independent intellectual property and successfully achieved  FDSOI wafers with controllable thickness. In order to solving the problem of carrier mobility degradation in electronic device with the shorten of the channel length, SIMIT successfully developed three high mobility SOI materials including strained SOI, germanium on insulator, and hybrid orientation SOI. Besides, aiming at developing SOI materials from 3D to 2D, SIMIT successfully synthesized single-crystal graphene wafer on germanium, which builds the foundation for developing 2D SOI wafers.During developing SOI wafers for integrated circuits, SIMIT also expanded the application of SOI materials in the fields of aerospace and silicon photonics.

Silicon wafer is the cornerstone of integrated circuit manufacturing, and is an important raw material to determine the performance of integrated circuits. Currently, the mainstream IC manufacturing is based on 12-inch silicon wafers. In 2014, SIMIT participated in the construction of Shanghai Zing Semiconductor Technology Co. Ltd., which was committed to providing a complete set of 12-inch silicon wafer mass production technology for 40-28 nm process from single crystal growth, wafer processing, wafer epitaxial growth, wafer analysis and characterization. In the future, SIMIT will develop 12-inch silicon wafer and 12-inch FDSOI wafer, and explore wafer-scale high-mobility SOI materials aiming at the demand of developing microelectronics technology along More Moore route. SIMIT will lead in the differentiated development of China’s advanced microelectronics process and realize the applications of FD-SOI techniques in IoT and vehicle electronics. Meanwhile, SIMIT will develop 8-inch radio frequency SOI (RF SOI) wafer and 8-inch Power SOI wafer, and explore the technology for integrating non-silicon semiconductors, wide bandgap semiconductors like SiC and GaN, with silicon and SOI architecture. Simultaneously, SIMIT will develop special techniques to realize high reliability SOI wafer and manufacture highly reliable IC chips to meet the demand of IC chip applications in special high radiation environments. Besides, SIMIT will develop the integration of silicon-based photonic devices with circuit on one chip using mature CMOS manufacturing techniques.