Editorial - FAMES Newsletter 3
This first quarter of 2026 has been amazingly exciting, showing advances we have been preparing for months, not to say years. First, we had the pleasure to inaugurate the FAMES Pilot Line. It was a great event that we were happy to share with our sponsors, the European semiconductor ecosystem, and of course with the FAMES consortium. The inauguration was materialized by the delivery of a new state of the art cleanroom at CEA-Leti, a construction that started back when the whole project began in late 2023.
As you have seen from the past editions, we did not wait for this new building to be ready to start our R&D activities, and we have more new breakthrough technologies to share, touching FAMES power management IC and 3D activities this time.
This quarter we also released our first 10nm FD-SOI Pathfinding PDK, which is a major milestone of the project. This PDK, together with PDKs for RF passive devices is at the core of the 2026 Open-Access Call we launched on March 9th. This was yet another vibrant event with more than 150 registered participants. You will learn more about the portfolio of technologies we unveiled during the Open-Access Call Launch by reading this newsletter.
All these different events had a significant echo in the press and we give a glimpse of their impact in this newsletter as well.
Finally, we held our first European FD-SOI Design School (EFDS) in January: a one-week course, mixing theoretical and hands-on training, focused on FD-SOI and embedded non-volatile memories. Learn more about it and get ready to register to our upcoming training events!
All in all, I am very pleased to see all the core activities of FAMES (R&D, infrastructure, open-access and training) addressed in this edition, showing that the FAMES Pilot Line has reached full speed and delivers shining results. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do!
