Intel Foundry Services (IFS) General Manager Stuart Pann has benefitted from unexpected demand for advanced packaging services from customers like Cisco, he told EE Times in an exclusive interview. He said that demand will be an “on ramp” to customers using more advanced packaging services and Intel’s latest 18A process node when it becomes commercially available next year.

“I don’t see anything that limits us, from a capacity point of view, with the deals we’re pursuing right now for advanced packaging,” Pann said. He and Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger decided to equip new packaging facilities a couple years ago when the PC and server markets were much bigger.

“We have a lot of capacity available for customers should they want to use us,” he said. “I don’t believe we’re going to be limited in terms of our business opportunities right now. We have a long way to go before we fill up those factories.”

Pann expects to provide Intel’s proprietary embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) and Foveros, an advanced 3D face-to-face die-stacking packaging tech, to a “new wave” of customers.

“You have hybrid bonding, logic tiles on top of base tiles,” he said. “We have learned how to make commercial agreements on advanced packaging because we know how to do PDKs [process design kits] and support on advanced packaging. Our customers are now willing to look at us and say, ‘Okay, can you do more?’”

The top foundry rival of IFS, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), hasn’t been able to meet a surge in demand for advanced packaging from customers like Nvidia as AI applications like ChatGPT soar, TSMC said in its most recent earnings announcement.

TSMC, with $69 billion in sales last year, dwarfs IFS, which saw 2023 revenue more than double to $952 million.

Some hesitation experienced

Some AI chip designers are hesitant about using IFS as their chip foundry.

“I think they’re getting better,” Keith Witek, the COO of Tenstorrent, told EE Times in an exclusive interview. “They’ve got to have IP companies like Samsung and Cadence and Arm. Intel has struggled with that the last 15 years when they’ve been on and off announcing that they’ve got foundry business. It’s hard, and I think they’ve gone further along the path toward success than they have any time before. We would happily use Intel as a vendor in the future.”

Still, some of Witek’s expectations are coming true.

In a show of support, Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan and Arm CEO Rene Haas are set to join IFS on stage at the IFS Direct Connect event this week in San Jose, Calif.

“What we’ve tried to do with 18A is make sure any combination of tools, whether from Ansys, Siemens, Cadence, Synopsys, will be qualified on 18A,” Pann said. “All the IP you need from a number of vendors will be available. We have 33 different system ecosystem partners at the event exhibiting, talking about what they’re doing. So 18A is really the node that we’ve built everything out from the ground up and going forward.”

OpenAI CEO set to speak this week

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also set to speak at the event.

“He’s talked a lot about the need for more capacity, to realize his vision of AGI [artificial general intelligence],” Pann said. “He’s going out raising money because he believes there’s not enough compute capacity being manufactured in the world to satisfy what he sees as demand for the future generations of ChatGPT.”

IFS aims to catch the AI wave with its 18A process tech.

“What 18A allows our customers to do is a very compact design. When you’re looking at hundreds of cores in a single chip, area scaling really matters. Power really matters,” Pann said. “So, 18A is the right process, at the right time, for AI-level devices. You have packaging on top of it, connectivity on top of it, software on top of it—all the things that we do.”

IFS has 50 test chips it plans to make this year, 75% of which are 18A test chips.

Pann said Pat Gelsinger has talked about “a $10 billion lifetime deal value in place right now. We will update that at the right moment as we get other deals coming in. We’re just starting. Our foundry business is centered around doing very large volumes of 18A wafers at scale because that’s a competitive process for us. It’s a high value-added process.”

Pann expects 18A revenue to begin kicking in next year.

IFS also has plans to announce details on 14A, the node after 18A, at the event in California. That new node will be roughly equivalent to the 1.4-nanometer process under development at TSMC, Pann said.

Clearwater Forest details coming

Intel is set to provide detailed information about Clearwater Forest, the company’s server chip, as a demonstration of its AI capabilities for foundry customers.

“This uses every aspect of advanced packaging,” Pann said. “It’s multiple dies in a very large package where we have to do singulated die tests. We have to work with thermal simulation tools with our EDA suppliers. We have to work with our assembly and test facilities to make sure we get the highest possible yields.”

UCIe is the interconnect tech between devices inside the Clearwater Forest package. Intel has 18A logic tiles in the device connected to the base die with micro TSVs (through silicon vias). “Now you can have this advanced compute unit that takes advantage of multiple logic tiles, base tiles—high speed connectivity with UCIe and then Ethernet potentially for board-to-board, rack-to-rack communications,” Pann said.

The disclosure of information on Clearwater Forest will be a demonstration of how IFS is differentiating itself as a systems foundry, he added.

“We’re taking every aspect that we know from our server business, and we’re making it available to our foundry customers,” Pann said. “That’s a huge behavioral change. We’re disclosing that architecture and saying it’s running now—because we want our foundry customers to be comfortable with the fact that, as we offer this up, we’re debugging our own products and pipe cleaning it.”

That means that “when they get ready to put this in production, we’ve solved all the problems,” he added.

Witek, who previously worked for AMD, said it may take years for IFS to shed the Intel mindset as a company that makes its own chips and become a significant player in the foundry business.

“I went through this personally when we spun GlobalFoundries out of AMD,” he said. “It took a good five to seven years. They didn’t know how to handle 180 customers. That’s a very different business.”

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved