Intel has announced a new $1-billion fund to support early-stage startups and established companies building disruptive technologies for the foundry ecosystem.
A collaboration between Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services (IFS), the fund will prioritise investments in capabilities that accelerate foundry customers’ time to market – spanning intellectual property (IP), software tools, innovative chip architectures and advanced packaging technologies.
Intel also announced partnerships with several companies aligned with this fund and focused on key strategic industry inflections: enabling modular products with an open chiplet platform and supporting design approaches that leverage multiple instruction set architectures (ISAs), spanning x86, Arm and RISC-V.
“Foundry customers are rapidly embracing a modular design approach to differentiate their products and accelerate time to market,” says 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.”
As a key part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel recently established IFS to help meet the growing global demand for advanced semiconductor manufacturing. In addition to providing leading-edge packaging and process technology and committed capacity in the US and Europe, IFS is positioned to offer the foundry industry’s broadest portfolio of differentiated IP, including all of the leading ISAs.
A robust ecosystem is critical to helping foundry customers bring their designs to life using IFS technologies. The new innovation fund was created to strengthen the ecosystem in three ways:
- Equity investments in disruptive startups.
- Strategic investments to accelerate partner scale-up.
- 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,” says Randhir Thakur, president of Intel Foundry Services. “Innovation thrives in open and collaborative environments. This $1-billion fund in partnership with Intel Capital – a recognized leader in venture capital investing – will marshal the full resources of Intel to drive innovation in the foundry ecosystem.”
Saf Yeboah, senior vice-president and chief strategy officer at Intel, comments: “Intel Capital’s history and expertise are rooted in chips. Over the last 30 years, we have invested over $5-billion into 120 companies supporting the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem, from the materials coming out of the ground to the software tools used to implement a design.
“Our investments, which range from pathfinding bets into early-stage companies to deeply strategic and collaborative investments, drive innovation across architecture, IP, materials, equipment and design.”
A key part of the IFS strategy is to offer a broad range of leadership IP optimised for Intel process technologies. IFS is the only foundry to offer IP optimised for all three of the industry’s leading ISAs: x86, Arm and RISC-V.
RISC-V
RISC-V offers a high level of scalability and customisation, and there is strong demand from foundry customers to support more RISC-V IP offerings.
As part of the new innovation fund, Intel is planning investments and offerings that will strengthen the ecosystem and help drive further adoption of RISC-V. The fund will help disruptive RISC-V companies innovate faster through IFS by collaborating on technology co-optimization, prioritizing wafer shuttles, supporting customer designs, building development boards and software infrastructure and more.
Intel is joining forces with partners in the RISC-V ecosystem, including Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive and Ventana Micro Systems.
The Open Chiplet Platform
With the advent of advanced 3D packaging technologies, chip architects are increasingly adopting a modular approach to design – moving from system-on-chip to system-on-package architectures. This provides a way to partition complex semiconductors into modular blocks called “chiplets”.
Each block is customised for a particular function, providing designers incredible flexibility to mix and match the best IP and process technologies for the product application. The ability to reuse IP also shortens development cycles and reduces the time and cost of bringing a product to market.
While there are opportunities in many segments, the data center market is one of the first to adopt modular architectures.
Many cloud service providers (CSPs) are looking to create customized compute machines that incorporate accelerators, with the goal of improving data center performance for workloads such as artificial intelligence.
Closely integrating accelerator chiplets in the same package as a data centre CPU enables significantly higher performance and reduced power compared to placing accelerator cards near CPU boards.
Tapping the power of modular architectures requires an open ecosystem since the approach brings together design IP and process technologies from multiple vendors. IFS is enabling this ecosystem with its open chiplet platform, co-developed with CSPs to accelerate the platform and package integration of customers’ accelerator IP.
The platform will leverage Intel’s packaging capabilities with IP optimised for IFS’ advanced process technologies, combined with services to accelerate customer time to market with integration and validation.
Additionally, Intel is committed to partnering with other industry leaders to develop an open standard for a die-to-die interconnect that allows chiplets to communicate with each other at high speeds.