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27/07/2021

Intel To Build Qualcomm Chips Will Be Built At Intel Factories




Intel To Build Qualcomm Chips Will Be Built At Intel Factories
Semiconductor chips for Qualcomm Inc will now be manufactured in factories of United States based chip maker Intel Corp.
 
Making this announcement the US based company also laid out a roadmap for expansion of its new foundry business so that it is able to catch up with its rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd by 2025.
 
Intel said another new customer for the foundry chip business will be Amazon.com Inc. For years, Intel had been the market leader in terms of chip making technology and was the leader in designing and manufacturing the smallest but the fastest computing semiconductor chips. It is also among the last few of the companies that design and manufacture their own chips.
 
However, in recent times, TSMC and Samsung have gone ahead in chip making compared to Intel as the manufacturing abilities of TSMC and Samsung have helped Intel’s rivals Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Nvidia Corp for making chips that are more powerful than those of the US firm. Chips are designed by AMD and Nvidia which are then manufactured by manufacturing rivals of Intel called foundries.
 
The company now expects to become the market leader again by 2025, Intel said on Monday, and highlighted five sets of chipmaking technologies that it plans to roll out over the next four years.
 
The most advanced of the technologies will be used in manufacturing chips from Intel's first new design in a decade for transistors which are tiny switches that translate to digital ones and zeros.
 
New generation of machines from the Netherlands' ASML will also be used starting as early as 2025. The new machines use what is called extreme ultraviolet lithography which is able to project chip designs onto silicon in a process that resembles the process of printing an old-fashioned photograph.
 
"We're laying out a whole lot of details to The Street to hold us accountable," Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger told the media in an interview, referring to investors.
 
Its naming scheme for chipmaking technology will also be changed by the company, Intel also, and plans to use names like "Intel 7" that align with how TSMC and Samsung market competing technologies.
 
The smaller the chip the better is the morn in the chip world. The previous names of chips made by Intel referred to the size of features in "nanometers". But according to Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSIresearch, an independent semiconductor forecasting firm, the names used by chipmakers became arbitrary marking terms over time. That resulted in a misconception being created of Intel being less competitive, he said.
 
Qualcomm and Amazon will be the first major customers for Intel. In the area of chips for mobile phones, Qualcomm dominates the world market and the company’s chip making will use what Intel is calling its 20A chipmaking process that will make use of the new transistor technology developed by the US firm that will help to reduce the amount of power consumed by the chip.
 
(Source:www.ndtv.com)

Christopher J. Mitchell

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