Intel Foundry Services (IFS) has announced Qualcomm and Amazon as its first customers. The company aims to leapfrog TSMC to the top by 2025.<\/b>
\nIntel recently launched Intel Foundry Services (IFS), a new branch of its foundry division that will manufacture third-party chips. IFS is now \u201coff to the races\u201d as the company announces its first major customers: Qualcomm and Amazon. Intel Foundry will produce Qualcomm chips using its newly-announced 20A process. The company though didn\u2019t announce a timeframe for when the first batch of these chips will arrive. Intel\u2019s 20A node itself isn\u2019t scheduled to be ready before 2024. So there\u2019s some time to it. It\u2019s also unclear whether IFS will be responsible for the manufacturing of all Qualcomm products or it will only produce select Snapdragon chips coming out at that time. Amazon, meanwhile, isn\u2019t having any of its chips manufactured by Intel. Instead, AWS (Amazon Web Services) will be the first customer to use IFS packaging solutions. Pat Gelsinger had previously suggested that the company is already in talks with dozens of companies for its IFS division. So you can expect it to name a few more clients in the coming times. But Qualcomm and Amazon could well be the highest-profile clients for Intel Foundry Services. Intel opened up its foundry to other companies with the launch of IFS earlier this year. The expansion is part of the company\u2019s new \u201cIDM (Integrated Device Manufacturer) 2.0\u201d strategy. It announced a $20 billion investment to build two new fabs in Arizona to expand its production capacity as the tech industry comes together to tackle the ongoing global semiconductor chip shortage. With this expansion, Intel is now looking to close the gap to TSMC and in the contract chip manufacturing space. TSMC leads the market with Samsung coming in at the second spot. But Intel hopes to leapfrog the two biggies into the top spot over the next four or five years. \u201cBuilding on Intel\u2019s unquestioned leadership in advanced packaging, we are accelerating our innovation roadmap to ensure we are on a clear path to process performance leadership by 2025,\u201d Mr. Gelsinger during the global Intel Accelerated webcast. In addition to naming the first two major partners for IFS, Mr. Gelsinger also announced a new naming scheme for the company\u2019s manufacturing process nodes as well as a roadmap during the said event. Its third-gen 10nm chips will be referred to as Intel 7 and it will bring up to 15 percent improvements in performance-per-watt over the previous generation. These chips are already in mass production and should arrive later this year. Intel\u2019s 7nm process node will now be Intel 4. It\u2019s still a FinFET product but will use EUV (extreme ultraviolet) technology for an approx.20 percent performance-per-watt gain over Intel 7. Samsung and TSMC already use the EUV technology for their 5nm products. Intel 4 chips will arrive towards the end of 2022. Next, we have Intel 3, which is the company\u2019s second-gen 7nm process node. It brings an 18 percent performance-per-watt gain over Intel 4 with increased use of EUV. Manufacturing of these chips will begin in the second half of 2023. The aforementioned 20A process will mark a major jump in chip technology for Intel. For the first time in over a decade, the company will debut a new transistor architecture called RibbonFET (FinFET has been in use since 2011). RibbonFET is also known as Gate All Around (GAA). Samsung is expected to use this transistor architecture in its in late 2023. In Intel\u2019s case,20A stands for 20 Angstrom (20A=2nm). As said earlier, Intel 20A will not arrive until 2024. Lastly, we have Intel 18A, the second-gen Intel chips to use RibbonFET. The development of these chips will begin in 2025. It will now be interesting to see whether all these developments will enable Intel to climb to the top in the chip manufacturing industry.<\/p>\n