Intel Foundry Direct Connect Keynote (Highlights)
Please welcome Intel CEO Lip Boutan. Welcome to Direct Connect. Uh thank you for joining us today and uh it is great to see so many uh good friends, partners and customers and thank you for all your support. You know, I've been the CEO for about five weeks now. And then some of
the people asking me since I joined Intel Libu, are you committed to the foundry? Uh the answer is yes. I'm so excited today to share with you. Uh I'm committed to make the Intel foundry successful and I know there are areas we need to improve. I'm determined to
strengthen our road map and our partnership and our execution going forward. As we drive this improvement, we see a lot of opportunity ahead of us. We are the only company that does advanced uh leading edge semiconductor R&D and manufacturing in the United States. Our R&D investments are driving new process technology and advanced packaging solutions.
We'll continue to booster our manufacturing uh capabilities and we're working to strengthen our position in each of these areas. First and foremost is the Intel 18A is supporting uh the launch of our Penta Lake products. Our first Penta Lake SKU will be launched at the end of the year and we'll have more SKUs coming uh in the first half of 2026. We'll continue to advance our 14A
which will enable us to serve a broader set of the market. We are working closely with key I call it the note drivers customers to help us define the features and KBIs that will make 14A the best-in-class note. I'm very pleased that Trump administration have make American technology and manufacturing uh leadership as a key priority. We are
committed to working with them to achieve the share goal. But to do that we know we need to up our game. We are up against some strong competitors or partners and they and we are focused to create the engineering first culture of continuous improvement. We have many strengths on
this to build. Intel technology power the majority of PC world PCs and data center and uh this is a result of R&D process technology advanced packaging and manufacturing investment I just spoke about but the past achievements do not guarantee future success. Our job now is to applies uh these strengths to the new way uh to meet the needs of the broader market. I'd like to welcome uh CEO of Synopsis Sashin to come here and then uh thank you for being here. Great to be
here with you. You've been working with us together to serve the customer and what are you hearing from the customers that about Intel foundry and where are the area that we can do better? customers are I want to say desperate for optionality and for uh technology that they can bring in uh there's huge silicon demand as you know and having an option like Intel foundry and you mentioned it earlier in terms of a uh North America technology foundry uh that's something that's very important for our customers uh what they're saying initially what they used to uh wonder is the difficulty to ramp up on an Intel technology versus what they're used to uh with other foundaries and I believe that the gap of uh design difficulty has absolutely shrunk. I'm looking forward and then joining me to welcome Anurut to the stage. I'm new to this Intel foundry and then uh what do you think the Intel foundry and my you know how we can uh your perception and listen to customer what are the changes and improvement first of all I'm so delighted that Libu is is there at Intel because it's a national asset and I think Libu is going to you know completely transform and one of the main things you know I of course had privilege of working with Libu for so long is we always talk about like uh uh team technology Y and customers and you know Intel and especially Intel foundry as you as you all know is like a service business. So customer comes
first and I know Libu has very good instincts to to understand what the customer wants to. Thank you. Yeah. And then uh in term of what excite you most about working with the Intel foundry and Intel as a whole company. So I really looking forward to it. I mean like like I said I think this whole industry is going to be 1 trillion plus you know the the electronics market is 3 trillion plus I saw all these reports that by 2035 even the foundry market could be like you know 500 billion plus so it's a huge opportunity so I look forward to working with you and Intel and really making a difference for our customers.
I'm just delighted uh to welcome CEO of uh Seaman's uh EDA. So, Lipu and and the audience, as you know, Intel Foundry and and Seammen's EDA have been working together on certification of our technologies in physical verification and simulation for years. You know, we're currently certified on Intel Foundry 18A. We're doing performance tuning on Intel Foundry 18 and we started the process on Intel Foundry 14 AE. So, lots of work going on in that space. And when you really contemplate what's going on with with our customers and our customers customers, they're undergoing a digital transformation where software now is the primary differentiation, right? So the idea of something that is software defined and silicon enabled is really taking hold within our industries. And as you take a
look at the the access to silicon becoming a national priority for many nations across the world, you know, they're worried about the access to silicon because it could be a society disruption or a disruption to the very way of life. And when we start imagining the almost limitless possibilities with AI and how it can impact our lives together going into the future, you know, it does create a a challenge with the number of new designs that have to get started in order to address all of this. So the world in my opinion needs Intel foundry to be successful with the delivery of advanced node technology and be able to manufacture it. And I really w want to welcome the CEO of PDF John Caparian. You know Intel has been a leader uh the leading IDM for decades.
And when it decided to make advanced process nodes available to its outside customers, so it system foundry customers, it recognized that in order to be able to yield ramp fast, you need to really characterize the way processes and designs come together differently differently for the foundry market. So about four years ago, it began using PDF systems in collaboration with its internal systems to build PDKs to build data sets that allow the engineers in R&D to interact more closely with the production the design teams and the eventual production teams to achieve best performance and variability below 7 nanometer to maximize performance, profitability and yield. We will be guided by the voice of the customer all of you and will act on your feedback. Uh we are humble in that approach as you can tell because we know your success is matter the most and anything else and uh we work every day to earn your trust. Please welcome
executive vice president and GM with Intel foundry Dr. Naga Chandra Shakarin. Today I want to share some of our vision towards the future as to how we will become a successful foundry. And as Libu highlighted in order for us to be a successful foundry we have to earn the trust of our customers and foundation to that are a few elements. The first piece is technology. We have to have innovative
technology that can deliver value to our customers. And along with technology, we need to provide a global resilient supply chain. The second aspect as Libu greatly highlighted in his opening talk is our partnership with our ecosystem providers as well as the broader supplier base in the industry. We have to collaborate and that's the only way we can win. And the third piece is to be predictable. Predictability is key to our customers success and to earn their trust we have to be predictable. And
today I would like to share a few thoughts on how we are making this transformation journey possible across Intel to earn our customers trust with the customer first mindset. On the technology front, this chart shows what we have done in the last four years. Everyone knows that Intel fell behind with our 10 nanometer technology. So our
first effort in the last four years was to shore up our technology competitiveness with Intel 10. This technology is now in high volume manufacturing. And not only for Intel 10, but we have continued to explore progressive ways to monetize our 14 nanometer as well as Intel 16. Intel 43 is Intel's first EUB node. And I would also note here that it's the leading edge node that's ramped in Europe and we have learned a lot as part of this node. I want to highlight a few cultural transformations that we have made. In the last couple of quarters, we pulled in transfer of this node to our manufacturing facility. In the past,
Intel would have waited longer for reaching maturity and we have now started moving this end to end and get the nodes earlier into our manufacturing facility. And by moving it earlier, what we have done now is enabled our manufacturing team to start looking at continuous improvement on yield, reliability and focus on delivering it to the customers. Intel 18A is the most advanced node that's developed and ramped here in United States and this node is industry first on several fronts. It's the first gate all-around technology that will be ramped in high volume manufacturing. It's the first node to have backside power and offerings to our customers and we are very delighted to have this node achieve the risk start manufacturing milestone.
Currently we are running this node in Oregon and we have five products that are already running in production. We have delivered our engineering samples to the customers. We are in the process of running our qualification samples and continue to make improvements with our 18A technology node. We are partnering with our ecosystem partners to offer this 18A technology solution to all of our customers in Arizona. We also have
the UMC joint developed 12 nanometer technology that we are working on to port over into the Intel factories. This will also be a foundry enabled node that can be offered to our customers. I want to share some progress on 18A that we have achieved. This first slide shows our defect density tracking on 18A. We
have achieved over 15% performance improvement and we are on track to deliver to our performance commitments. There's a 30% chip density improvement on 18A and our defect density is tracking to our plan by which we will be able to ramp it in production towards the end of 2025 towards the latter part of the second half. Our best wafers have already achieved the defect density targets and we have forward-looking vintages that's now running in the factory that gives us confidence that we will hit this milestone. We have also heard feedback from our customers that 18A is not targeted towards the broader market. It was designed with high performance compute in mind. We are now proud to have the next revision of this which is the 18P that will be offered to our customers. 18 has design rule
compatibility to 18A and we are working on improving the performance by another 8% on 18 AP offerings. It'll have additional ribbon size. It'll have uh corner tightening. It'll have additional VT ranges available for our customers.
And this would be targeted for a broader ecosystem for us to deliver. And we are making good progress on both 18A and 18 AP. We have now started focusing a lot on delivering our 14A technology node. We are running this in Oregon today and our progress is good and we are learn taking lot of learnings from our 18A and moving it to 14A so that we can deliver this node predictably. 14A is expected to provide 15 to 20% improvement in performance per watt and it'll also offer scaling benefits of almost 30% improvement in chip density. We expect a 25% power reduction and maybe even more as we continue to optimize this node. One of
the important things with 14A is that this is a second generation ribbon fit and second generation backside power. So a lot of the challenges that we faced on 18A and the lessons learned on 18A will port over and that's what is giving us confidence with our road map with 14A. As we move away from copy exact and as we democratize innovation across the Intel factories, we need Intel factories to work on variability reduction, cost improvement, yield improvement and reliability improvement. And that requires us to partner very closely with our ecosystem partners. One of the differentiating factors on 14A is high NA EUV tool. In Oregon, we have landed our second high EUV tool. In
fact, this tool came up much faster compared to our first one and we are working in great collaboration with ASML. The tool is performing well to its expectations. I want to make two points for the audience today. The first one is Intel still has the option to have either a low NA or a high NA solution on our 14A technology. and it's design rule compatible. There will be no impact to the customers depending on the path that we choose. Second, the high EUV is
performing to the expectations and we will introduce it at the right time. We already have data on 18A as well as 14A that shows yield parity between our low NA based solution and a high NA based solution. So we are continuing to make progress on the technology front and ensuring that we have the right options available for us to make sure the solution we deliver to our customers has the lowest risk and the best reward in terms of the decisions we make. We talked about technology and our global capacity. We talked about ecosystem
partnership. But the most important thing is we have to earn our customers trust and we have to change our culture to be customer first mindset. And it's easier said than done. It is going to
take time. But we are making several progress in this area. There are four pillars along which we are focused on where we are putting customer first mindset. The first is predictability. We
have to be predictable to our customers and we are not there today. We have to earn customer trust by delivering and executing stronger and being predictable to our customers. The second pillar is quality. Intel has to make significant improvements in ensuring the customers have no impact negative impact from our quality based deviations. We have to
change from a testbased uh quality detection back to a inline quality detection and we are investing heavily in this area not only through test chips but by partnering with our equipment suppliers to install all the inline detection capabilities. The third aspect is velocity. We have to not only move fast but we have to move in the right direction and this is where we need partnership with our customers and ecosystem partners. Velocity is going to be a key aspect of how Intel delivers to our customers so that they can feel they can get to market faster. Time to market is going to be a key criteria for our success. And the last one is on
affordability. We have to do all of this while we are prudent with our spending. On the affordability side, we are driving all of the AI and automation solutions into our factories. I want to
invite Joe and Jessica on stage, please. Joe and Jessica, I want you to meet one of our newest team members. Please welcome to the stage Chip, our robotic inspector. Come on, Chip. Come on up at stage. We're going to demonstrate Chip's
thermal imaging capability. If you look across the stage, we have an actual motor from one of our facilities. We heated it up backstage with a heat lamp because we wanted to simulate what a bad motor winding would look like. And in just a moment, Jessica
will dial in the camera and we'll be seeing the heat signature of this motor on stage. Oh, wow. There it is. It actually held the heat pretty good. It's at about 189°. Definitely something wrong. That's hot. Definitely something wrong. So, keep in
mind, although this data back at our facility would be streaming live to our advanced process and control system, it's an AI analytic platform that monitors this data for us. And in this scenario, it would have autogenerated a maintenance ticket and we would have had a technician go out and address this issue before it became a real problem for our factory. Excellent. Thank you very much, Joe and Jessica. Please give a round of applause for this automation team. I'm a fab person, so it always
feels strange to hold a wafer by hand. Um, always cringe a little bit, but this is our leading edge 14A node technology wafer. And this is running in our Oregon factory, and we continue to make progress with this technology. What I want to make sure we say today is we are committed. We are committed to Foundry. We are committed to our customers and we are committed to working closely with our ecosystem partners to make Intel Foundry successful for the customers.
It's not just important for Intel. It's important for all the employees that work in Intel, all the communities where Intel operates, all the hundreds of thousands of individuals who support Intel. And more importantly, it's important for the semiconductor industry to ensure that our innovation progresses and our solutions for the customers continue to progress. And we commit to listen. We commit to be humble and we
commit to listen from you and deliver solutions to you. Please welcome senior vice president and GM with Intel Foundry, Kevin O. Buckley. My goal is to talk a little bit more together about the why. So that everything you hear
today, I want you to hear intentionally done through the lens of what our customers are asking for. I'll focus this morning on how we're leveraging our rapidly growing relationship with customers to expand what we're doing with three key priorities. The first of those priorities is better matching our technology to their diverse needs. attributes of the technology not just in the details of the technical details but also the schedule of what we're delivering for a technology and the predictability. Second, we're going to
talk about how we're transforming our business and technical processes to improve our execution, our responsiveness to our customers and again the predictability of what we're doing for our customers. And third, we've talked a lot today about ecosystem. I'm going to talk about how we're making some new investments specifically to expand our ecosystem even more based on the feedback we're getting from our customers. All three of these priorities for us are about how we are intentionally transforming Intel Foundry into a service first company founded on trust. Our goal is to enable our customers vision and that vision is reasonably well represented here. Vision
of the next generation products. This is what our customers are telling us they need us to deliver for them. It's a 3D construction with multiple fully utilized base radical die with many compute dials stacked on top. It's surrounded by an extraordinary massive memory capacity. Both the highest
performing HPM and also in this case LPDDR die. And these are all coherently connected by both electrical and optical interfaces. Tens of terabits of bandwidth. And what you're looking at here is in excess of a 12x reticle size solution. At Intel Foundry, we believe based on what our customers are telling us that we are uniquely positioned across the entire industry to deliver these massive heterogeneous systems on a package. I want to start with 18A not just because it's an incredibly important first technology for us, but when you hear about 18A as a uh as a technology today team, I want you to also think of it as the foundation of all of the nodes we're building in the future for the coming few years.
In the relentless pursuit of next generation computing, Intel Foundry introduces the Intel 18A process node. Standing for 18 angstros, 18A is the most advanced node fully designed and produced in North America. It features an industry first combination of technologies supported by a broad ecosystem of IP, EDA, and design services partners. It delivers better performance per watt and improved area efficiency, enabling new computing architectures for applications demanding the highest level of performance. Intel Foundar's Power VIA introduces a firstofits-kind backside power delivery technology. Traditionally, power is routed through the front side of the die, creating congestion. Power Via
places power wires beneath the transistor layer, separating them from signal wires. By eliminating the need for power routing on the front side of the die, more resources become available to optimize signal routing. The result is a 10% density boost in cell utilization and a 4% improvement in ISO power performance. Ribbon FET, a revolutionary leap and transistor technology, is featured in the 18A process. It uses ribbon-shaped channels surrounded by a gate, offering better control and higher drive current at all voltages. The incredible combination of ribbon fed and power via paves the way for innovations that will shape the future of high performance computing, artificial intelligence, mobile, and networking. That's the power of Intel
Foundry. 18A is in risk production today and is ramping for our first customers in the second half of this year. Our engagement with customers on 18A because of the improving in maturity of the silicon maturity and all the investments that our EDA ecosystem partners is resulting in substantial uplift in our 18A platform. We've had over 100 customer ecos and ecosystems tapeouts since we've started the development technology. It's a great technology that we really are very proud of and all of our IP partners are already underway uh reccharacterizing their IP to take advantage of 18 and we have two products already taped out in the fab today in 188. Let's transition to 14A. We've
already delivered the 14A PDK to multiple customers uh in multiple markets. Yes, AI, but also edge applications. The plans are already underway with multiple customers for test chips that were being developed with them. And if you reflect back on
the lessons that Naga described for 18A where we as a team, an Intel team were in catch-up mode. We just were we're developing two fundamental new technology elements in parallel with a variety of other priorities as we were bringing up other technologies. So our commitment based on that learning in 14A is for that technology yes to be second to none. But by building on of all all of our experience in 18A this is our second generation gate all-around technology. This will be our second
generation backside power delivery technology. We're committed to our customers to make our execution more predictable. And you also heard from an even larger expanding ecosystem of partners. We're moving our ecosystem efforts away from solely design enablement and IP partnerships into areas like process R&D, physical design, and ramping yield and quality. We're
making major major investments to build trust with our customers. I'm pleased today to be part of a MediaTek announcement where they're announcing that their first product in Intel 16 not only taped out and is through the fab. Let's hear from them directly. Hello, I'm Vince Hu and I'm the corporate vice president for strategic marketing and the compute business at MediaTek. I'm happy to share our experience working with Intel Foundry today. The Intel Foundar's
expertise has been instrumental to enhance chip performance while minimizing power consumption and area. The Intel Foundry team has been a reliable partner, consistently supporting us in achieving our customers goals and pushing the boundaries of innovation. Their responsiveness to challenges has been remarkable. Whenever issues arose, they provided swift and effective solutions, helping us mitigate risks efficiently. Given the global reliance
on semiconductors, having a robust and diversified foundry supply chain is essential. Before I conclude in silicon, I do want to acknowledge one specific customer for us, a foundational customer, and that's the US government and their key suppliers. Customer feedback, whether commercial customers or the government customers are telling us consistently they all want secure end-to-end research and development to manufacturing capabilities for leading edge technologies right here in the US. The US government has stepped up to the table and has committed investments to support that vision along with us.
Programs like ramp and ramp c allowed us to jumpstart the design and prototyping capability of our 18A technology and the secure enclave program recently announced enables trusted manufacturing for key US government programs and the ship program extended the capabilities beyond silicon to include things like advanced packaging. Taken together, all of these investments ensure capabilities from design to silicon to system, all right here in the US. Summarizing our silicon journey team, we are production ready this year on 18A and Intel 16 and we're engaging with customers to solve their problems by developing the 18A, PT, and 14A platforms and extending our partnership to 12 nanometer with UMC. Every one of these technologies will start manufacturing right here in the US and all are comprehensively enabled by our ecosystem partners. Intel Foundry is working extremely hard to adapt to the AI era from process technology, advanced packaging, and massive substrates. This
thing really is extraordinarily impressive in a PowerPoint slide, but I promise you when you can hold it in your hands, it will be far far more impressive. This is an extraordinary solution. defined by you but enabled by Intel Foundry. Let me wrap up my key
messages team. First, we're listening. We really are listening to your needs. Second, we're committed committed to delivering our road maps, evolving road maps, and delivering them on time. And third, we're working very hard to work in with intentionality for your to win your trust. We're very very thankful for the opportunity to do so.
2025-05-05 09:48
