Focus Is on Protecting Critical Markets Such as Automotive, Industrial IoT, and Secure Infrastructure

GRENOBLE, France – June 18, 2025 – CEA-Leti and Soitec today announced a strategic partnership to enhance the cybersecurity of integrated circuits (ICs) through the innovative use of fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) technologies. This collaboration aims to position FD-SOI as a foundational platform for secure electronics by leveraging and extending its inherent resistance to physical attacks.

At the heart of the initiative is a joint effort to experimentally validate and augment the security benefits of FD-SOI—from the substrate level up to circuit design. The project aims to deliver concrete data, practical demonstrations, and roadmap guidance to meet the surging cybersecurity demands in critical markets such as automotive, industrial IoT, and secure infrastructure.

Combining Expertise to Secure the Future of Electronics

The partnership, which will utilize GlobalFoundries’ advanced chip manufacturing capabilities, will address a growing need for trusted components in embedded and cyber-physical systems—systems that must deliver security services and withstand both software- and hardware-level attacks. With FD-SOI’s proven advantages against laser fault injection (LFI) attacks due to its thin-film architecture and channel isolation, the technology presents a compelling foundation for next-generation secure IC design.

Key goals of the partnership include:

• Highlighting FD-SOI’s existing strengths in cybersecurity.
• Co-developing innovations across the substrate-design stack to boost physical robustness and meet security requirements in automotive and other embedded systems.
• Demonstrating empirical security data to reinforce FD-SOI’s credibility in certification contexts such as SESIP and Common Criteria.

Context: Rising Threats, Rising Demand

“In an era marked by increasing attacks on connected systems and autonomous vehicles, the need for embedded hardware capable of resisting physical tampering has never been greater,” said CEA-Leti CTO Jean-René Lequepeys. “FD-SOI’s unique combination of performance, energy efficiency, and attack resistance offers an ideal answer for industries that demand both trust and efficiency. This project will leverage research results from the FAMES Pilot Line.”

FD-SOI’s critical benefits include:

• Physical attack resistance, enabled by electrical isolation between the channel and substrate.
• Power-performance optimization, vital for battery-constrained applications like automotive ECUs and industrial sensors.
• Security design enablement, allowing tailored countermeasures such as fault detection and isolation of sensitive circuit domains.

Long-Term Vision: Toward a New Cyber-Substrate

While the initial phase focuses on leveraging existing FD-SOI capabilities, the project sets the stage for long-term innovation. The envisioned next-generation cyber-substrate would expand upon FD-SOI’s strengths by incorporating:

• Enhanced protection against backside and invasive physical attacks.
• Embedded anti-tamper features and physical unclonable functions (PUFs) for hardware fingerprinting.
• Dynamic response mechanisms to detect and counter emerging threats.

This future-oriented work will address both cyber and supply-chain vulnerabilities—making FD-SOI not only more secure, but also more indispensable.

“Our goal is to raise awareness of FD-SOI as a trusted technology platform and to collaboratively explore innovations that will strengthen physical resistance against emerging attack vectors,” said Christophe Maleville, CTO and senior executive vice president of Soitec’s innovation[JM1] . “The development of a new substrate may be part of longer-term prospects, while the initial focus is to leverage existing FD-SOI capabilities and provide experimental validation of their value for secure systems.