The Wafer Is the New Battleground: Soitec CPO René Jonker on Building AI from the Substrate Up

What happened

In an interview at SEMICON West 2026, Soitec Chief Product Officer René Jonker discussed the company, which was spun out of CEA-Leti in 1992 around the Smart Cut process. Soitec now runs five main technology platforms: RF-SOI (used in RF switches and low-noise amplifiers in practically every 5G phone and Wi-Fi module), FD-SOI (used in automotive radar, IoT microcontrollers and edge devices, often cutting power by 30 to 50 percent without a node shrink), Power-SOI (high-voltage automotive and industrial circuits), POI (acoustic RF filters for 5G and 6G), and Photonics-SOI, developed a decade ago and now the platform carrying the company. Jonker said Photonics-SOI is 'now seen as the new gold'; as AI cluster connectivity pushes traffic from copper to fiber, it is driving Soitec's business 'with a very impressive growth rate' and underpins the co-packaged optics now coming into AI data centers. The article notes that Soitec trades on Euronext Paris and that an investor who put $100 into its stock in January 2026 was holding more than $600 by early October. On competition, Jonker said direct competition comes mostly from GlobalWafers, which 'has or used to have access to our IP,' while technology-level competition includes FD-SOI customers who could choose FinFET at TSMC, and a trade-off between silicon and indium phosphide for optical waveguides. SmartSiC (lowering the cost of SiC power devices for EV inverters) and RF-GaN on insulator (in development for 6G power amplifiers and aerospace) remain in development, and FD-SOI is moving to smaller geometries.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: SemiWiki · 10/23/2026 · View original source