[ad_1]
By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Intel Corp on Monday announced that its factories will begin manufacturing Qualcomm Inc chips and has established a roadmap to expand its new foundry business to catch up with competitors such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd d ‘by 2025.
Amazon.com Inc will be another new customer for the foundry chip industry, said Intel, which for decades has been the technology leader in making the smallest and fastest computer chips.
But Intel lost that lead to TSMC and Samsung, whose manufacturing departments helped rivals Intel Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Nvidia Corp produce chips that surpass those of Intel. AMD and Nvidia design chips which are then made by competing chipmakers called foundries.
Intel said Monday it plans to resume its lead by 2025 and described five sets of chip-making technologies it will deploy over the next four years.
The more advanced use Intel’s first new design in a decade for transistors, the tiny switches that translate into numeric ones and zeros. Starting in 2025, it will also operate a new generation of machines from the Netherlands’ ASML that use what’s known as extreme ultraviolet lithography, which projects chip designs onto silicon much like printing an old-fashioned photograph. .
“We are giving The Street a lot of detail to hold ourselves accountable,” Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger told Reuters in an interview, referring to investors.
Intel also announced that it would change its naming scheme for chip-making technology, using names like “Intel 7” that align with how TSMC and Samsung market competing technologies.
In the chip world where smaller is better, Intel previously used names that hinted at feature size in “nanometers”. But over time, the names used by chipmakers have become arbitrary tagging terms, said Dan Hutcheson, managing director of VLSIresearch, an independent semiconductor forecasting company. This, he said, gave the mistaken impression that Intel was less competitive.
Intel’s first major customers will be Qualcomm and Amazon. Qualcomm, which dominates chips for mobile phones, will use what Intel calls its 20A chip manufacturing process, which will use new transistor technology to help reduce the power consumption of the chip.
Amazon, which increasingly manufactures its own data center chips for its Amazon web services, is not yet using Intel’s chip manufacturing technology but will use Intel’s packaging technology, the process of assembly of chips and “chiplets” or “tiles”, often stacking them in said 3D formation. Intel excels in this packaging technology, analysts say.
“There have been many, many hours of technical and in-depth engagement with these first two clients, and many more,” said Gelsinger.
Intel did not give details of how much revenue or manufacturing volume the customer would earn, although Gelsinger said at an event announcing the news that the Qualcomm deal involved a “major mobile platform. “and engaged in” a deep strategic manner “. Qualcomm has a long history of using multiple foundry partners, sometimes even for the same chip.
The biggest question Intel faces is whether it can deliver on its tech promises after years of delay under previous CEO Brian Krzanich. In recent weeks, Intel has announced the delay of a new data center chip called Sapphire Rapids.
But David Kanter, analyst at Real World Technologies, said Intel was more cautious than in the past. The years of delay resulted in part from the “pride” of tackling multiple technical problems in a single generation of technology.
This time, Intel is showcasing five generations of technology in four years, tackling smaller sets of issues and also saying it might not introduce the new EUV technology with its upcoming “Intel 18A” process if it does. is not ready.
“Intel is absolutely going to catch up and be ahead in some dimensions, along with TSMC over the next few years,” said Kanter, the analyst. “Intel really has people who spend all of their time figuring out how to deploy new materials and technologies to optimize their performance.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; editing by David Gregorio)
[ad_2]
Source link