In what could easily be construed as a setback for Intel’s foundry initiative and its vaunted plan to deliver five nodes in four years, the company announced today that it no longer plans to use its own 20A process node with its upcoming Arrow Lake processors for the consumer market. Instead, it will use external nodes, likely from partner TSMC, for all of Arrow Lake’s chip components. Intel’s only manufacturing responsibilities for the Arrow Lake processors will consist of packaging the externally produced chiplets together. The announcement occurs as Intel embarks on a vast restructuring that comes amid troubling financial results last quarter. The company continues to lay off 15,000 workers in the largest workforce reduction in its 56-year history.
The node change comes after Intel initially demoed a wafer of Arrow Lake processors fabbed on the 20A node at its Innovation 2023 event, which indicated the chips were already far along in the development cycle. At the time, Intel said Arrow Lake would come to market in 2024.
Intel says its crucial next-gen 18A node remains on track, and it has now shifted its engineering resources from Intel 20A to the newer 18A node. As such, it appears that Intel will now leapfrog over its 20A process entirely to avoid the capital expenditures required to bring the node to full production. Eliminating the always eye-watering ramp costs of a new node, particularly one as advanced as 20A, will surely help the company meet its cost-cutting goals.
The Intel 20A node was never planned for many products due to the company’s fast-track move to the more advanced 18A node, so building out an extensive network of fab equipment might have limited returns. However, Intel’s 20A brought several new advances, like RibbonFet Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology, which is Intel’s first new transistor design since FinFET arrived in 2011. It also marked the debut of the company’s PowerVia backside power delivery tech, which routes power for the transistors through the backside of the processor die.
Intel says the learnings it gained from its 20A node have contributed to the success of its 18A node, which makes sense given that 18A is a tighter refinement of the technologies invented for 20A. Intel again noted that it had reached a sub-0.40 D0 defect density (def/cm^2) for 18A, a critical measurement of the yield rate for a process node. Being under a 0.50 D0 rating means yields are within the range typically considered a production-worthy.
Intel notes that it has chips built with the 18A process already powered on in the lab and booting operating systems and also touted that it has now delivered its critical PDK 1.0 to customers. This is the key framework that will allow external customers to build chips using Intel process nodes, a critical component of Intel’s IDM 2.0 turnaround plan, which hinges on the company becoming an external foundry that produces chips for external customers.
This is breaking news…more to come.