Most analysts agree that this proposition is a non-starter until Intel can catch up with its manufacturing process. And rightly so, without that, Intel Foundry Services (IFS).
The big picture: Intel has ambitions to create a foundry business by manufacturing chips for other companies. This is an important strategic initiative that the company will need to recoup the massive investment it is now making in fabs around the world.
Most analysts agree that this proposition is a non-starter until Intel can catch up with its manufacturing process. And rightly so, without that, Intel Foundry Services (IFS) would lack serious competitive differentiation (yes, packaging, but that is not enough). And we have also cautioned that the company lacks customer service muscles after an entire history of the fabs team running the show.
Editor’s Note:
Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm. Jonathan has developed growth strategies and alliances for companies in the mobile, networking, gaming, and software industries.
But beyond that there are even more concerns.
When we talk about semis fabrication, we tend to treat the different foundries nodes as fungible, as if a customer could easily trade Samsung for Intel for TSMC. This is not accurate. In reality, each fab has a different way of doing manufacturing. Intel’s process was designed to make CPUs, and those processes are not the same as what is needed for other types of chips. For instance, mixed signal chips which need to process digital versions of analog signals (like cell phone signals) while also doing pure digital logic, require a very different set of steps for manufacture — different machines, calibrated differently, in a different order. To put it politely, Intel does not have a great track record for producing their own mixed signal parts.
And then there are the tools. A major part of the foundry customer experience is the software tools used to handle communications between the fabless customer and the foundry.
