Intel on Thursday unveiled a silicon wafer studded with chips created with a production process set to arrive in 2025, a signal designed to reassure customers that the company’s years of hardship are behind it.
“We are staying on schedule or ahead of schedule,” said CEO Pat Gelsinger of the company’s plan to improve production processes. He showed a shiny plate of memory chips created with Intel’s upcoming process 18A, which recycles transistors at the heart of chips and the way power is delivered.
Intel is trying to drastically accelerate production progress to reach the 2025 target of restoring the chip’s leading performance, which it lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung. If it succeeds, it will mean that computer chips will progress faster after half a decade of slight performance improvements. And that could mean Intel is better suited to your digital life by building chips in your car, phone and graphics card for a gaming computer.
At the heart of the effort is going through five new manufacturing processes in four years: Intel 7 in 2021 with Alder Lake chips that now power computers, Intel 4 in 2022, Intel 3 in 2023, Intel 20A in early 2024 and Intel 18A at the end of 2024 – although the lag between production and product delivery means that 18A chips will not arrive until 2025. The display of the plate is “proof” that Intel is on the way, said Gelsinger .
Gelsinger, a chip engineer who returned to Intel a year ago, has technological confidence in the position of CEO, but it will be difficult for the company to return. As the chipmaker lags behind the leaders, as IBM and GlobalFoundries have done in recent years, it is harder to justify the colossal investment needed to move to the new technology.
The embodiment of Intel’s difficulty is Apple’s decision to take out Intel Core processors from its Macs in favor of its own M-series chips created by TSMC. At the same time, AMD is gaining market share, Nvidia is gaining from games and AI, and Amazon has introduced its own server processors.
Gelsinger spoke on Intel Investor Day, where he and other executives tried to persuade often skeptical analysts that the company’s huge costs for new chipmaking equipment would pay off. This will come through first-class products and external customers who arrive to use the new foundry’s production capacity.
The Intel 20A introduces two major changes to the chip’s design, RibbonFET and PowerVia, and the Intel 18A improves it for better performance. RibbonFET is Intel’s take on transistor technology called gate all around, in which the gate that controls whether the transistor is on or off is wrapped entirely around ribbon-carrying channels that carry electricity.
And PowerVia supplies power from the underside of the transistor, freeing up the top surface for more data connection schemes. Intel is catching up with RibbonFET, but has an advantage with PowerVia, which the industry calls power supply.
Intel insists on another advantage – packaging technology that combines different “chips” into one more powerful processor. The Sapphire Lake member of Intel’s Xeon server family, which arrives this year, uses a type of packaging called EMIB, while the Meteor Lake computer chip, which arrives in 2023, uses another called Foveros.
New Intel PC Processors on the Go
Intel built its first prototypes of Meteor Lake in the last quarter of 2021 with the Intel 4 process and loaded them into computers, said Ann Kelleher, executive vice president and head of Intel’s technology development department.
“This is one of the best startups of leading products we’ve seen in the last four generations of technology,” Keleher said. “Throughout its life, Meteor Lake will deliver hundreds of millions of units, offering the brightest demonstration of leading large-scale packaging technology.”
The package will play a role in future computer processors, including Arrow Lake in 2024, which will include the first chipsets created with Intel 20A. Then comes Lunar Lake, which will use Intel 18A chips. Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake will use a new graphics chip architecture, which Intel promises to be a “huge step forward”, which is important given that graphics chips these days do much more than draw pixels on your screen – for example AI and video image processing.
Kelleher also described many in detail research and changes in production to prevent catastrophic problems Intel has clashed in recent years. On the one hand, the improvements are already modular, so the problem with one should not derail the others. On the other hand, Intel develops contingency plans when problems arise. And pay more attention to the advice of chip equipment suppliers such as ASML.