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

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com Sept. 3, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger talked about Intel's product route and technology evolution at the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference (Deutsche Bank's 2023 Technology Conference).

"I want to say that I just went to Oregon with our technology development team yesterday and it's going well. We think we're on the right track with Intel 18A. For OEM customers, they need reliable PDK. They need to believe that we can do that. Our interest in this area is growing and going very well."

"We believe the Intel 18A will be in production by the end of next year, putting us in a leading position in 2025. Our internal products, such as Clearwater Forest, are progressing smoothly, and our next generation of customer products are in the late design stage, as are our contract manufacturing customers."

"now, we have received a large amount of 18A capacity prepaid from our customers. customers have enough confidence in us that they have chosen to inject capital to speed up our 18A capacity. We are very happy about this. Overall, as we said, everything is progressing steadily. Customers' prepayments have indeed painted a heavy touch on the development momentum and manufacturing capacity of 18A."

"TSMC has established a market, and we are TSMC customers. So I am well aware of their wafer cost, wafer average sales price, and the N2 budget they present to their N5 customers and N3 customers. We know what the goal is."

Intel said the Intel 18A, the last node of Intel's "four-year five process nodes" program, is steadily moving forward with internal and external test chips as planned and is expected to be ready for production in the second half of 2024 and launch in 2025.

Intel said that more than five internal products are currently being developed based on the latest Intel 18A process node, and the Intel 18A is expected to be available in 2025. The next-generation energy-efficient core Intel Xeon scalable processor codenamed Clearwater Forest is scheduled to be delivered in 2025 using the Intel 18A process.

In terms of contract manufacturing, the Intel 18A process node will initially increase production through Intel's internal products, so that various problems in the process can be properly solved, thus reducing the risk of the new process to a large extent for Intel's external customers. A few days ago, Intel announced that it has signed a multi-generation cooperation agreement with Synaptics to deepen its long-term strategic partnership in the field of semiconductor IP and EDA (Electronic Design Automation) to jointly develop an IP product portfolio based on Intel 3 and Intel 18A process nodes for Intel OEM customers. Previously, Arm has signed an agreement with Intel OEM for multi-generation cutting-edge system chip design, enabling chip designers to use Intel 18A to develop low-power computing system-on-chip (SoC). Intel will also use Intel 18A to build customized 5G system-on-chip chips for Swedish telecom equipment company Ericsson.

At the same time, Intel introduced the latest RibbonFET transistor, which will be launched at the Intel 20A process node. Brief introduction of CTOnews.com attached RibbonFET transistor:

Through RibbonFET transistors, Intel has implemented a fully circumferential gate (GAA, gate-all-around) architecture. Together with PowerVia back power technology, it will be launched at the Intel 20A process node and continue to be adopted at the Intel 18A process node to help Intel regain process leadership, improve product performance, and provide higher quality services to Intel OEM customers.

In a transistor, the gate acts like a switch, controlling the flow of current. In 2012, Intel took the lead in introducing FinFET (fin field effect transistor) technology, which allows the gate to surround the upper, left and right sides of the transistor channel, and its vertical structure allows the industry to integrate more transistors into the chip, thus giving a strong impetus to the continuation of Moore's Law over the past decade.

As the size of the transistor becomes smaller and smaller, the short channel effect becomes more and more obvious, the current control becomes more and more difficult, and the FinFET has reached the physical limit. As Intel's first new transistor architecture since FinFET, the RibbonFET full-surround gate transistor allows the entire band of transistor channels to be surrounded by gates, and its benefits mainly include the following three aspects:

First, in the RibbonFET transistor, the gate can better control the flow of current and provide a stronger driving current at any voltage, which makes the transistor switch faster, thus improving the performance of the transistor.

Second, the horizontal channels of the RibbonFET transistor architecture can be stacked vertically, rather than placing the fins side by side like the FinFET, so the same performance can be achieved in less space, thus driving further miniaturization of the transistor size.

Third, RibbonFET will further improve the flexibility of chip design, and its channel can be widened or narrowed according to demand, making it more suitable for different application scenarios, whether mobile phone or computer, game or medical, car or artificial intelligence, and can be easily configured on demand.

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