There are always debates on who does what best in the semiconductor industry, but most agree that
Today at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel announced new customers, customer updates and new
Intel Custom Foundry a natural extension of the fab
The fab business always has been a business of scale, so it comes as no surprise that Intel would logically want to take on the fabrication of others’ chips to increase scale. Intel has competition from Samsung, TSMC and GlobalFoundries in the foundry space, but until 2010 Intel only produced their own chips from their own designs. That changed when Intel took on
New foundry customers and details on others
Today at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel Custom Foundry announced new customers and details on previously announced customers ranging from 22nm all the way down to 10nm, including Achronix,
This is part of a journey that Intel started in 2010 to enable multiple fab customers, which involved making a lot of changes to their standard tools and integrating other companies’ IP. This meant building chips with the help of IP from leaders like Synopsis, Cadence and Mentor Graphics that led to Intel building out their ecosystem of design tools and supported IP. This was a huge change from prior decades where it was Intel designs, Intel tools in intel IP in Intel fabs.
New ARM-based IP
The lessons learned from building chips for others has led Intel to reach another major milestone today with their capabilities as a fab. That milestone announced today at IDF is the ability to now fab processors for ARM Holdings customers using Artisan IP. There’s an ARM processor on the Altera FPGA they fab, too.
The ability to fab ARM Holdings processors in the traditionally x86 Intel fab comes from a partnership between Intel and ARM that includes ARM’s Artisan Physical IP platform. This means that Intel has access to ARM’s high performance and high density logic libraries as well as their memory compilers and POP IP. While Intel has had the ability to fab an ARM-based part, the addition of the Artisan IP makes it easier.
This means that ARM Holdings customers have another choice when it comes to considering a foundry when it comes to a leading process node like 10nm. Currently, there are no 10nm chips so all foundries are currently talking about 10nm as a future node, but the reality is that many foundries will have 10nm chips shipping in 2017.
What it all means
The partnership between ARM and Intel to deliver ARM Artisan Physical IP within Intel’s Custom Foundry further legitimizes Intel’s efforts to open their Custom Foundry to more than what some considered “the random customer”. The addition of ARM IP to Intel’s fab also legitimizes ARM’s own Artisan Physical IP as the industry standard for physical IP with all major fabs now supporting it.
Intel has come a long way since making only their own chips with their own designs and tools and now they are beginning to present themselves as a serious foundry competitor to Samsung, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries, all three who heavily rely on mobile foundry volumes for profitability.
Intel may not be making chips for
Net-net, this is a win for both Intel and ARM Holdings, but the biggest winner are the customers who see even greater competition in the foundry business.
Required disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry including Intel, Qualcomm, ARM Holdings, Samsung Electronics, Advanced Micro Devices, referenced or related to this column. I do not hold equity positions in any company cited.