Intel unveiled a new $1 billion fund today to help early-stage entrepreneurs and established firms develop revolutionary technologies for the foundry ecosystem. The fund, which is a cooperation between Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services (IFS), will prioritize investments in intellectual property (IP), software tools, new chip architectures, and enhanced packaging technologies that will help foundry customers get to market faster.
The company also announced partnerships with some companies that are aligned with this fund and are focused on key strategic industry inflexions such as 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.
Offering a broad range of leadership IP suited for Intel process technologies is an important aspect of the IFS goal. IFS is the only foundry that provides IP optimized for all three major ISAs: x86, Arm, and RISC-V.
RISC-V, as the industry’s top open-source ISA, provides an unrivalled level of scalability and adaptability. Foundry clients have expressed a significant desire for more RISC-V IP solutions. Intel has planned investments and offers as part of the innovation fund that will boost the ecosystem and assist drive broader adoption of RISC-V. By working on technological co-optimization, prioritizing wafer shuttles, supporting customer designs, developing development boards and software infrastructure, and more, the fund will assist innovative RISC-V firms to evolve quicker through IFS.
“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 inflexion. 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.”
–Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO
Intel recently launched IFS as part of its IDM 2.0 plan to help fulfill the growing global demand for advanced semiconductor manufacturing. IFS is positioned to offer the foundry industry’s broadest portfolio of distinctive IP, including all of the leading ISAs, in addition to delivering cutting-edge packaging and process technology and committed capacity in the United States and Europe.
A robust ecosystem is critical to helping foundry customers bring their designs to life using IFS technologies. The 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,” 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 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, said: “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.”
Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive, and Ventana Micro Systems are among the RISC-V ecosystem’s most prominent partners. IFS intends to offer a variety of RISC-V IP cores that have been validated and performance-optimized for various market areas. IFS will optimize IP for Intel process technologies by cooperating with top vendors, ensuring that RISC-V operates best on IFS silicon across all sorts of cores, from embedded to high-performance.
A vibrant open-source software ecosystem, in addition to hardware and IP, is essential for accelerating the growth and adoption of the RISC-V processor and completely unlocking value for chipmakers. IFS will fund an open-source software development platform that will allow partners from throughout the ecosystem, as well as institutions and consortia, to experiment freely. To support this program, RISC-V International, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture and extensions, announced today that the company has joined.
Intel is also committed to working with other industry experts to create an open standard for a die-to-die connection that allows chiplets to interact at high rates. The industry can build a new, open ecosystem that will enable interoperable chiplets from multiple foundries and process nodes to be packaged using a variety of technologies by leveraging a good track record of widely implemented standards such as USB, PCI Express, and CXL.
Customers who value the ability to quickly incorporate accelerators optimized for new and changing data centre workloads are enthusiastic about the new open chiplet platform.
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