Intel’s Foundry Plans

It sounds rather sycophantic like a Court Circular starting: ‘HM the Queen granted an audience to …..’

Maybe Intel – whose $54 billion revenues represent a sixth of the revenues of the entire semiconductor industry – has now attained a similar majestic status where one is said to have been granted access to its facilities rather than to have signed a foundry deal.

That being said, you have to ask: What is Intel up to with this foundry lark?

Tabula is Intel’s second foundry customer. Intel’s first foundry customer was another programmable logic company called Achronix.

Both Achronix and Tabula are in the early stages of their development and their volumes will be low.

Tabula will use Intel’s 22nm finfet process. No date is given when it will start to do so. Intel’s 22nm was due late last year. Now Intel is saying that the first 22nm products are slated for April and volume for July.

Intel has an operation called Intel Custom Foundry which has raised speculation that Intel may go seriously into the foundry business to defray the expense of its fabs.

However two small users of wafers like Achronix and Tabula don’t really confirm that Intel is serious about developing a foundry business.

While saying they’re going to use a process which Intel itself isn’t yet using for commercial production sounds aspirational rather than real.

Intel says it does have other, undisclosed, foundry customers. Maybe these are aspirational too, or maybe they do actually make commercial chips on Intel’s lines. We don’t know.

What other explanations could there be for Intel signing these two FPGA customers? 

Well, it may mean that Intel wants to get back into the programmable logic business- which it tried to get into in the 1980s and later exited. That seems very unlikely.

Or Intel may see a need for putting progammable fabrics on its SOCs and this is a way to gain the capability. 

It’s all a mystery to me.