The process-development cost of dropping below 20nm could exceed $1 billion and require updates in fabrication facilities that could cost more than $10 billion, according to the McKinsey analysis, which suggested the result could be a dramatic disruption in the economics of the semiconductor business.

That threat, along with Intel's failure to keep pace in the market for mobile and handheld computing devices, led competitors to charge that the leading-edge technological capabilities that kept Intel on top of the semiconductor market for decades had become irrelevant in markets dominated by ARM architectures and chips from smartphone-processor market leader Qualcomm.

The delay Intel was forced to announce in all but the "M" and desktop versions of its 14nm "Broadwell" processors to the fourth quarter of 2014 rather than the first quarter of 2014 added fuel to the fire.

Announcing the 14nm version of the SerDes chips from the custom foundry business, Intel CEO Bob Krzanich has previously spoken of the chip company's manufacturing prowess as a way to compensate for weak sales in the mobile market, gives Intel a chance to highlight the 14nm process available only to it, and reinforce its message of technical superiority, even in the absence of much of its other 14nm processor products.

"This announcement is just the first of many exciting announcements we will make regarding the benefits of using Intel's industry-leading 14nm Tri-gate process technology and game changing advanced IP," according to a statement from Anurag Handa, senior director, Marketing and Business Development, Intel Custom Foundry.

Intel uses its 14nm tri-gate manufacturing to make Stratix system-on-a-chip FPGA/ARM CPU chips for ostensible competitor Altera. The chip giant has also reportedly been in negotiations with Marvell Technology Group over a similar deal and is expanding the facilities and workforce for its custom-foundry business to help make itself more competitive in the market for chip components including both SerDes and FPGA, according to an analysis in SeekingAlpha.

Intel's demonstration of a general-purpose, 14nm SerDes chip seem to be statement in defence its status as the leading semiconductor design and manufacturing to this day, despite competitors' claims that the company is caving in to short- and long-term obstacles.

The 14nm SerDes is chip designed to reduce the size of its 22nm SerDes by 40 per cent, and also to cut power consumption by 20 per cent. The 14nm SerDes design is based on that of the existing 12Gbit/s and 28Gbit/s SerDes built on Intel's 22nm SerDes Tri-gate process. The newest version of Intel's general-purpose SerDes includes 10Gbit/s to 32Gbit/s high-speed versions and 1Gbit/s to 10Gbit/s low-power versions. They support a range of standard protocols for networking and I/O to connect circuit-board components in mobile or handheld devices, including USB, PCIe, Ethernet, and 10G-KR.

The low-power version also provides low standby power and support for protocols like MIPI M-PHY and USB SuperSpeed Interchip (SSIC), which are used for low-power, high-speed connections between components inside mobile and wireless devices. The high-speed versions also address OIF, 100G Ethernet, and 32 FibreChannel for high-performance networking applications.

Intel executives tout the low-power versions as "a complete foundry offering," including integration, test configuration, and system simulation. as well as orientation and protocol configurability. The size and power-use specifications demonstrate that it's possible to shrink the space and power requirements of even complex components while increasing performance, according to statements in the announcement attributed to Mark Bohr of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group.

It also demonstrates that "clearly, Moore's Law is alive and well," he said.

Moore's Law—a 1965 prediction that the number of transistors that will fit on a silicon chip would double every one and a half to two years without adding significantly to cost—hit a couple of major bumps at the same time Intel saw its dominance of the personal-computing market weaken as mobile-computing devices grew in popularity at the expense of PCs.

Between 2009 and 2012, CPU performance increased at between 10 per cent and 20 per cent per year, rather than the 60 per cent predicted by Moore's Law. Switching from the 32nm or 28nm nodes to the 22nm node on a 300mm wafer increases design costs by half, process development costs by 45 per cent, and fabrication costs by about 40 per cent, according to the December 2013 report by McKinsey & Co.

By: DocMemory
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