Intel executives today detailed the new business vision for the newly renamed "Intel Foundry" foundry division and revealed the most advanced chip manufacturing processes on Intel's technology roadmap.
The process will be supported by ASML Holdings NV's High NA EUV machines. These machines are the size of a double-decker bus and cost $3 each$500 million to produce the smallest transistors for use in any commercial lithography system. ASML's first High NA EUV device arrived at Intel's Oregon fab late last year.
A "rebuild" of Intel
Today, Intel detailed its plans for Intel Foundry at the Foundry Direct Connect event, Intel's first dedicated event dedicated to foundry processor manufacturing. In addition to CEO Pat Gelsinger's keynote address (pictured), the conference was also attended by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who will be in person later today, and executives from other major chip industry vendors such as Broadcom.
Intel's foundry business has so far won contracts for chip production with a total lifetime value of more than $15 billion, at least one of which is for Microsoft's unspecified, custom chips, which will leverage the upcoming Intel 18A manufacturing process, which will manufacture transistors based on a gate-based design, which is currently being adopted by Intel's top competitors.
"It's a name change, a reorganization, a new organizational model, a rebuild of Intel," Gelsinger said on stage. ”
To date, the full-gate Intel 18A node remains the most advanced manufacturing process on Intel's publicly disclosed development roadmap. At the Foundry Direct Connect conference in the morning, the chip giant detailed a more advanced process called Intel 14A, which is expected to go live in 2027 and will use ASML Value 3The $500 million High NA EUV machine engraves transistors into chips.
The High NA EUV machine uses a new type of optical element, called a deformable mirror, to direct the resulting laser beam onto a silicon wafer that can engrave transistors with a resolution of 8 nanometers, which is higher than the 13 of the previous generation of machinesThe resolution of 5 nm is significantly improved. High NA EUV devices are also expected to reduce processor defects and speed up chip production, which is also beneficial to Intel's manufacturing program.
The new ASML machines operate on the same principle as the current generation EUV devices that Intel uses in its factories. They all work by vaporizing a small amount of tin thousands of times per second to produce a powerful laser beam. Most of the photons are absorbed by the optics and reach the fab operator's wafer through the optics, but the remaining light is still strong enough to produce high-precision transistors.
"Moore's Law isn't over yet, Moore's Law is still valid," Gelsinger said. ”
In addition to announcing Intel14A, Intel also revealed this time that it plans to launch multiple versions of the process, one of which is represented by the letter P, and its performance is 5% to 10% higher than the base version. Intel's competitor TSMC likewise offers some performance-optimized versions of the node.
There is also an upcoming process named T. The technology will support through-silicon vias and thin wires, which will allow multiple chips to be stacked together to create a large 3D processor. Intel uses through-silicon vias to build the GPU Max family of AI accelerators, which combine 47 semiconductor modules and about 100 billion transistors into a single product.
"AI is profoundly changing the world and how we think about technology and driving silicon, creating unprecedented opportunities for Intel Foundry, the world's most innovative chip designer and the world's first AI-era system foundry," said Gelsinger. ”
Ecosystem strategy
Engineers use a special application called an electronic design automation (EDA) tool to design chips. Intel said today that six EDA software manufacturers will offer "tool qualification and IP readiness" to help customers design chips that can be fabricated using Intel's 18A process, including Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys and Ansys, which are being combined through a $35 billion acquisition.
In many cases, chip teams don't start a new project from scratch, but instead build their chips on top of Arm's pre-packaged blueprints. Intel today detailed a project it is working with Arm called the Emerging Business Initiative, which will provide manufacturing support, financial assistance and other resources to startups developing ARM-based system-on-chips at Foundry Direct Connect.
"We're delivering a world-class foundry, delivered by resilient, more sustainable, and secure***, complemented by unmatched system-on-a-chip capabilities, all of which combine to provide customers with everything they need to design and deliver solutions for their most demanding applications," said Stuart Pann, senior vice president of Intel Foundry. ”