Nothing enhances the portability of an electronic product like reducing power consumption.
Low power usage is directly achieved by lowering the operating voltage, since power is proportional to the square of the operating voltage. On such wafers, the devices are assembled in a thin layer of silicon that is separated from the substrate by a buried oxide layer. At supply voltages below 1 V, the performance of this device was roughly twice that of the same circuit fabricated on a bulk wafer. The circuits used in these applications must operate at frequencies in the gigahertz range. New device speed records were reported for both SiGe and GaAs transistors at IEDM, which is sponsored by the IEEE Electron Devices Society.