Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In March last year, Intel CEO Pat Kissinger announced the "IDM 2.0" strategy, in which Intel opened its own contract manufacturing services to the outside world while expanding the use of third-party contract manufacturing capacity.

At the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit held in September this year, Pat Kissinger said that Intel contract manufacturing services will usher in an "era of system-level foundry", which is different from the traditional contract manufacturing model that only supplies wafers to customers. "Intel provides wafers, packages, software and chips." This is actually a reflection of Intel in order to more open its own contract manufacturing services, so why did Intel begin to attach importance to contract manufacturing services?

If "system-level OEM" is to describe Intel's "system-level OEM" in one sentence, it is:

Everything that has to do with chip manufacturing has been given.

Specifically, Intel's "system-level OEM" includes four aspects: wafer manufacturing, packaging, core, and software.

Wafer manufacturing: provide customers with their process technology, such as RibbonFET transistor and PowerVia power supply technology and other innovations.

Packaging: provide customers with advanced packaging technologies, such as EMIB and Foveros.

Core: Intel's packaging technology and the General Core High Speed Interconnection Open Specification (UCIe) will help core particles from different suppliers or produced with different process technologies work better together.

Software: Intel's open source software tools, including OpenVINO and oneAPI, accelerate product delivery and enable customers to test solutions before production.

The decoupling of chip design and manufacturing Intel's open contract manufacturing service is easy to understand, so that it can make more money. It's like "renting out your idle house can increase your income." But if it's just to sell idle chip capacity, there's no need to take it so seriously. The logic behind this is that Intel wants to decouple its chip design from manufacturing.

Friends familiar with the semiconductor industry may know that at present, companies in the semiconductor industry can be roughly divided into three categories:

IDM: both design and manufacturing, such as Intel and Samsung.

Fabless: just design, not manufacture, such as AMD, Nvidia.

Fab: just make it, such as TSMC.

Although Samsung and Intel are both IDM manufacturers, the situation is not quite the same.

Samsung's chip design and manufacturing departments are relatively independent. For example, many chip products of Nvidia and Qualcomm are made by Samsung.

Intel's chip design and manufacturing departments have long been highly bound, simply Intel-designed chips made by Intel (the main product). This creates a problem, that is, the whole design and production is the "internal process". In other words, due to process differences, chips designed by Intel according to the "internal process" are difficult to find other contract manufacturers to make. And other Fabless design chips want to find Intel OEM, also need time to adapt to Intel's "internal process", is also more difficult.

For Samsung and TSMC, this is not a big problem. Take Nvidia's graphics card products as an example. The chips used in RTX 3090 are made in Samsung 8nm process, while the chips used in RTX 4090 are made in TSMC 4nm process. Due to the "openness" of Samsung and TSMC in contract manufacturing services, Fabless manufacturers like Nvidia can "jump left and right" and choose contract manufacturers relatively freely.

Another problem caused by the high binding between chip design and manufacturing departments is the low flexibility of capacity regulation. Chip manufacturers, like most traditional factories, lose money as long as the machines stop, so chip manufacturers often need to find ways to fill their capacity. The result of high binding is that you can only fill the capacity with your own chip products. In this way, when the market environment changes, we cannot flexibly adjust the output of our own chip products.

So now Intel is opening more contract manufacturing services is to decouple chip design and manufacturing and break the highly binding relationship between chip design and manufacturing. At the same time, establish a chip foundry ecology of your own.

Conclusion 1. Intel has done chip foundry for other manufacturers in the past, but the sense of existence is relatively low (small quantity, low market share). For example, Spreadtrum SC9861G-IA is manufactured by Intel 14nm LP process.

2. Due to Intel's lack of experience in the contract manufacturing industry, it may take some time to adjust.

3. Intel is very sincere in opening up EMIB (2.5D package) and FOVEROS (3D package).

4. RibbonFET transistor and PowerVia power supply technology are the key technologies of Intel 20A process, which shows that Intel has no need to retain its most high-end technology and will be completely open.

5. Due to the opening of Chiplet technology and some related IP, it will be easier for some small-scale chip manufacturers to use this technology to design chips.

6. Intel's process characteristics are different from those of Samsung and TSMC (even if they are the same technology nodes), so for chip design companies, this is an additional option.

7. Intel's process should attract some server chip manufacturers, such as Amazon.

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