Intel on Thursday unveiled a silicon wafer loaded with chips built through a production process scheduled for 2025, a signal aimed at reassuring customers that the company’s years of hard chip production are behind it.
“We are always on or before the deadline compared to the time we have set,” said chief executive Pat Gelsinger about the company’s plan to improve production processes. He demonstrated a glossy supply of memory chips built on the company’s upcoming Intel 18A processor, which redesigns transistors at the heart of chip circuitry and how power is delivered to them.
Intel strives to dramatically accelerate manufacturing progress to meet the 2025 goal of restoring chip performance in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung. If successful, it will mean that PC chips develop rapidly after half a decade of malfunctioning performance. It can also mean that Intel becomes very useful in your digital life by creating chips inside your car, phone and PC graphics card.
The core of the effort goes through five new production processes in four years: Intel 7 by 2021 with Alder Lake chips now powered by PCs, Intel 4 by 2022, Intel 3 by 2023, Intel 20A initially of 2024 and Intel 18A late. 2024 – although the slowdown between production availability and product delivery means that 18A chips will not arrive by 2025. Displaying the wafa “is a point of proof” that Intel is on track, Gelsinger said.
Gelsinger, a chip engineer who returned to Intel last year, is bringing a technical certificate to the CEO’s job, but it will be difficult for the company to get back on track. When a chip manufacturer falls behind a leading edge, as IBM and GlobalFoundries did in recent years, it becomes difficult to justify the huge investment needed to advance to new technologies.
Adding to Intel’s dilemma is Apple’s decision to remove Intel Core processors from its Macs in order to process its M-series chips manufactured by TSMC. At the same time, AMD is gaining market share, Nvidia is gaining in popularity with AI, and Amazon is launching its own server processors.
Gelsinger spoke of Intel Investor Day, when he and other executives sought to convince analysts who often doubted the company’s massive spending on new chip machines would pay off. That will come with premium products and incoming foreign customers to take advantage of their new production capacity.
Intel 20A introduces two major changes in chip design, the RibbonFET and PowerVia, while the Intel 18A refines it for better performance. RibbonFET is Intel’s adoption of a transistor technology called a round gate, in which the gate that controls whether the transistor is open or closed is fully enclosed in power-like electron-carrying channels.
And PowerVia brings power to the bottom of the transistor, freeing up extra space for more data link rotation. Intel is playing RibbonFET, but it has the lead in PowerVia, an industry called back-end power delivery.
Intel presses another lead – packaging technology that integrates different “chiplets” into one very powerful processor. A Sapphire Lake member of the Intel’s Xeon server family arriving this year uses one type of packaging, called EMIB, and the 2023 Meteor Lake PC chip hires another, called Foveros.
New Intel PC processors are on the way
Intel built its first prototypes for Meteor Lake in the latter part of 2021 with the Intel 4 processor and installed them on PCs, said Ann Kelleher, senior vice president leading Intel’s technology development phase.
“This is one of the best product launches we’ve seen in the last four generations of technology,” Kelleher said. “During its lifetime, Meteor Lake will deploy hundreds of millions of units, providing a clear demonstration of leadership packaging technology at high volume.”
Packaging will contribute to future PC processors, including Arrow Lake in 2024, which will include the first chiplets built with Intel 20A. Then comes Lunar Lake, which will use Intel 18A chiplets. Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake will use Intel’s new graphic chip architecture that promises to be a “big step forward,” which is important considering the fact that graphic chips these days do more than just paint pixels on your screen – for example -AI and video. image processing.
Kelleher also explained the amount of research and production changes to prevent the catastrophic problems that Intel has faced in recent years. First, development is now modular, so the problem alone should not distract others. For one thing, Intel makes emergency plans when problems arise. It also pays close attention to the advice of chip machine providers such as ASML.