Intel 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. 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 integrated device manufacturer (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:
“Intel is an innovation powerhouse, but we know that not all good ideas originate from within our four walls,” said Randhir Thakur, president of Intel Foundry Services. “Innovation thrives in open and collaborative environments. This $1 billion fund in partnership with Intel Capital – a recognised leader in venture capital investing – will marshal the full resources of Intel to drive innovation in the foundry ecosystem.”
Truly 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 (cloud service providers) to accelerate the platform and package integration of customers’ accelerator IP. The platform will leverage Intel’s leadership 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. Leveraging a strong track record of widely deployed standards – such as USB, PCI Express and CXL – Intel says the industry can drive a new, open ecosystem that will enable interoperable chiplets from different foundries and process nodes to be packaged using a wide variety of technologies.
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