In today's rapid development of science and technology, a revolution in the field of chips is quietly brewing. According to the latest news, global semiconductor giant Intel may reach a major cooperation with British chip design company Arm - licensing its 12nm process technology. This move not only indicates the strong alliance of the two giants, but is more likely to subvert the existing chip foundry market pattern.
Let's go back to a few months ago, the smoke of the Sino-US war has not yet dissipated, and the wafer foundries in Taiwan, South Korea and the United States have already been gearing up and increasing their efforts to build factories to compete for semiconductor subsidies and other resources from various countries. In this highly competitive environment, the collaboration between Intel and ARM stands out.
For a long time, Intel has dominated the computer processor market with its dominant x86 architecture, but its power consumption problem has always been a shortcoming that plagues its further development. With its relative power-saving advantages, the ARM architecture has won more than ninety percent of the market share in the smartphone chip market and mobile device applications such as tablets.
At this moment, Intel's eyes turned to ARM. It is reported that the main reason why Intel seeks the authorization of UMC's 12nm technology is because of its low power consumption and advantages in the ARM architecture. Through this cooperation, Intel can not only improve its foundry strength, but also focus on the sprint of advanced processes.
In the first half of this year, Intel has announced a partnership with ARM to allow ARM-based mobile phone chips and other products to be OEM produced by Intel. This move is seen as Intel's positive overture to Qualcomm, MediaTek and other large manufacturers, and some industry insiders even speculate that Intel may further win OEM orders for Apple chips.
However, this is not Intel's entire ambition. After seeing the trend of localized semiconductor production in the United States, Intel decided to cooperate directly with UMC for technology transfer. In this way, in the future, Intel can better serve the IC design industry in the United States through related processes.
UMC has also shown a positive attitude towards this cooperation. At the conference in October, UMC revealed that it is planning to discuss the possibility of using 12nm to produce low-power logic products, and expects the 12nm process to be completed in early 2025 and bring revenue contribution. UMC is also considering converting some of its 28 22nm capacity to 12nm to save costs and adhere to the Yield principle.
This series of actions undoubtedly indicates that a new era of chip foundry is coming. For domestic enterprises, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. In the face of cross-border cooperation with international giants, we should maintain confidence and firmly believe that China's technological strength and innovation capabilities are sufficient to meet any challenge.
In the future chip foundry market, domestic enterprises are expected to seize opportunities and achieve breakthroughs with the help of their own technology accumulation and market insights. We look forward to more domestic companies emerging in this wave of change and becoming new stars in the global chip foundry field.
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