A $1 billion innovation fund and $5.4 billion acquisition are Intel’s latest manufacturing milestones.
Early this month, semiconductor giant Intel launched a $1 billion fund to promote chip foundry innovation. According to the company’s press release, the new fund will support both early-stage startups and established companies working to develop “disruptive technologies for the foundry ecosystem.”
The fund is a collaboration between Intel Capital, Intel’s venture capital arm, and Intel Foundry Services (IFS), Intel’s manufacturing division. The fund is earmarked for investments that could accelerate foundry customers’ time to market by targeting intellectual property, software tools, chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies.
According to Intel, the innovation fund was “created to strengthen the [foundry] ecosystem in three ways: Equity investments in disruptive startups; Strategic investments to accelerate partner scale-up; [and] Ecosystem investments to develop disruptive capabilities supporting IFS customers.”
“Intel is an innovation powerhouse, but we know that not all good ideas originate from within our four walls,” said Randhir Thakur, president of Intel Foundry Services. “Innovation thrives in open and collaborative environments. This $1 billion fund in partnership with Intel Capital… will marshal the full resources of Intel to drive innovation in the foundry ecosystem.”
The timing of these announcements is pivotal. As the global chip shortage continues to disrupt many industries, semiconductor manufacturers like TSMC, Samsung and Intel are vying to seize the opportunity to ramp up chip production.
In the press release announcing the new $1 billion fund, Intel Chief Strategy Officer Saf Yeboah said that the company has invested over $5 billion in 120 companies over the last 30 years to support the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem by helping early-stage companies develop innovative architecture, IP, materials, equipment and design.
Since launching IFS in March 2021, Intel has been investing heavily in fabrication. In September 2021, the company broke ground on two new fabs at its campus in Chandler, Ariz., which are expected to be fully operational in 2024 and will cost Intel roughly $20 billion dollars. Just a week after announcing its billion-dollar fund for foundry innovation, Intel separately announced that it will acquire Israeli chipmaker Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion.
Tower Semiconductor owns a number of fabs globally, including two in Israel, two in the U.S., three in Japan, and one fab being established in Italy that will be shared with STMicroelectronics. Intel expects the acquisition to close in approximately 12 months, subject to regulatory approval.
The manufacturing investments are part of a strategy that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger calls IDM 2.0, short for Integrated Device Manufacturing.
“IDM 2.0 is an elegant strategy that only Intel can deliver—and it’s a winning formula. We will use it to design the best products and manufacture them in the best way possible for every category we compete in,” Gelsinger said in a March 2021 press release announcing the strategy.
Intel Joins RISC-V International
Alongside the news of the $1 billion innovation fund, Intel announced that it has joined RISC-V International, a nonprofit organization promoting the open standard RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). RISC-V is seen as a top open-source ISA, offering a high degree of scalability and customization that’s in high demand by foundry customers.
Intel’s new innovation fund will partly be leveraged to strengthen the RISC-V ecosystem. “I’m delighted that Intel, the company that pioneered the microprocessor 50 years ago, is now a member of RISC-V International,” said David Patterson, vice-chair of the board for RISC-V International.
As part of RISC-V International, Intel will partner with other members, including Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive and Ventana Micro Systems. Andes Technology targets its variable-vector length processors for AI and machine learning (ML) applications. Esperanto Technologies has RISC-V processor cores and an on-chip memory system with a low-power design and scalable architecture that runs with high energy efficiency.
SiFive’s collaboration with Intel is already underway, with the two companies working on a scalable compute platform and development system board to be used for software enablement later this year. The company also makes its portfolio of cores available to IFS, offering high-end RISC-V system-on-chip performance for customer platforms.
Finally, Ventana Micro Systems will combine its modular, scalable chiplet solutions, resulting in less development time with an IO Hub manufactured by IFS.
The crux of Intel’s strategy is to offer a range of validated RISC-V IP cores that are performance optimized for different market segments, thus casting a wider net for its future customer base. In addition, IFS will optimize IP for Intel process technologies through its partnerships to ensure that RISC-V performs well on silicon across all core types.
The three types of RISC-V offerings that will be available are the partner products manufactured on IFS technologies, RISC-V cores licensed as differentiated IP, and chiplet building blocks based on RISC-V.
Chiplets are modular building blocks meant to simplify complex system-on-chip design, providing flexibility to match the most suitable IP and process technologies for any production application. IFS facilitates this paradigm with its open chiplet platform meant to allow IP reuse for shorter development cycles and lower cost to market. The platform is being codeveloped with cloud service providers, which are among the primary adopters of chiplet architectures as many cloud providers are seeking customized compute machines that incorporate accelerators to improve performance for advanced workloads such as AI.
“Foundry customers are rapidly embracing a modular design approach to differentiate their products and accelerate time to market,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. “Intel Foundry Services is well-positioned to lead this major industry inflection. With our new investment fund and open chiplet platform, we can help drive the ecosystem to develop disruptive technologies across the full spectrum of chip architectures.”
IFS considers itself “the only foundry to offer IP optimized for all three of the industry’s leading ISAs: x86, Arm and RISC-V.”
