Layoffs at Intel continue to make waves with little insight into where some of the smartest engineers and engineering managers are going. However, information has started to emerge with a Wall Street Journal story about a chip packaging expert at Intel joining Samsung, its archrival in the foundry business.

Gang Duan, a 17-year veteran at Intel with nearly 500 patents, is joining Samsung Electro-Mechanics America as executive vice president. His patent portfolio includes micro-bump interconnects and redistribution layer (RDL) technology. He was Intel’s 2024 “Inventor of the Year” for his contribution to advanced packaging technologies like Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) and glass substrates.

He played a critical role in the development of EMIB technology, an in-package high-density interconnect for heterogeneous chips. In fact, Intel has already deployed EMIB in its server CPUs to reduce latency by bridging CPUs with high-speed cache.

Next, Duan played a key role in the development of glass substrate, which, unlike traditional organic substrates, offers lower thermal expansion, superior flatness above 400°C, and lower dielectric loss. However, Intel, which introduced glass substrate technology in 2023, announced to scale back glass substrate R&D a year later, vowing to seek external sources as part of cost-optimization efforts after massive foundry business losses.

The reason for Duan’s departure isn’t known yet, but Intel pulling back from cutting-edge work on glass substrate technology could be an important factor. It’s no coincidence that Samsung is building a pilot line for glass substrates this year with plans to enter mass production in 2027. Glass substrates are considered critical for next-generation chips powering artificial intelligence (AI) training models.

While Intel’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan is under the spotlight regarding layoffs and the subsequent exodus, it all began during his predecessor’s watch. The $10 billion cost-cutting plan, announced in 2024 while Pat Gelsinger was at the helm, included the decision to scale back glass substrate R&D.

Intel engineers on the move

Besides Intel engineers joining competitors, a lot of engineers in middle and senior management are leveraging their well-earned engineering capital to set up semiconductor startups. Take the case of Suresh Subramanyam, an advanced packaging expert who left Intel in July 2023. Since then, he has helped set up two startup companies in India: semiconductor packaging and system provider Infinipack and workload-as-a-service (WaaS) provider FlexAI.

Then there is AheadComputing, a startup formed by ex-Intel engineers that aims to develop ‘breakthrough’ application processors based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Four Intel veterans—Debbie Marr, Jonathan Pearce, Srikanth Srinivasan, and Mark Dechene—founded this company in Beaverton, Oregon, to focus on silicon for AI and HPC applications and support IP.

They all worked at Intel’s Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG), and collectively, their work at Intel amounts to nearly a century. Their motive is to develop CPU cores that excel in per-core performance. Renowned CPU designer and Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller has recently joined the board of directors at AheadComputing.

Another startup story—Mihira AI—has also originated from Intel’s engineering hallways. In 2022, Intel kickstarted work on Project Endgame, a network-based solution aiming to deliver additional graphics power to local hardware. A year later, Intel shelved this work to enable users to stream games to their laptops or smartphones from a data center outfitted with Intel GPUs, most likely due to cost-cutting initiatives.

A few months before Intel announced that it would put Project Endgame on indefinite hold, a senior graphics technology executive at Intel left the company for a startup that aims to become a software provider in the data center space. Raja Koduri left the company after leading Intel’s Accelerated Computing and Graphics business for five years.

Koduri’s startup would license Project Endgame software to build heterogeneous data center architectures to deliver graphics and AI workload acceleration. The primary goal for its software stack is to provide an agnostic solution that can compete with Nvidia’s CUDA and AMD’s ROCm.

Flip side of Intel shakeup

The account of these two startups provides anecdotal evidence that points to how Intel’s flattening of organizational structure and subsequent workforce crisis are leading to the formation of promising new startups. The experienced engineers and engineering managers departing Intel are utilizing their years of specialized expertise in new ventures to serve a rapidly evolving semiconductor industry landscape.

In a way, it’s also an antidote to the much-talked-about study that calls very low turnover at Intel, causing inertia and a barrier to the infusion of new ideas despite having world-class engineers and managers. For instance, the study points to staff members who have been at Intel for 15-plus years and have never worked anywhere else.

It’s worth mentioning here that Intel has recently hired four senior executives, including the appointment of 25-year sales veteran Greg Ernst as chief revenue officer. Srinivasan Iyengar, who came from Cadence Design Systems, will now lead Intel’s custom chip design business.

Next, Jean-Didier Allegrucci, the new head of AI chip engineering, was previously at Rain AI, a semiconductor startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Finally, Shailendra Desai, who spearheaded mobile SoC designs at Google, has been named VP of AI fabric and networking.

Intel, once synonymous with speed and execution, is in the midst of a disruptive cycle in which it’s forced to cut its workforce to become nimble and leaner. And losing some of its best engineers could be a gain for competitors as well as startups.

By: DocMemory
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