As an integrated device manufacturer (IDM), our complementary capabilities mean we can fully integrate our design, process, and packaging into products that are truly the best in their class. This has never been more important than now – at a time when technology is leading the way and the entire world is becoming digital. In a recent announcement, Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, revealed the new investments being made in Intel’s foundry business and how we will use our technological leadership to help our foundry customers drive their next-generation innovations.
Whether your product needs front-end design, back-end design or both, when it is integrated with a unique combination of our foundry co-optimized development kits based on industry-standard electronic design automation (EDA) tools and flows and powerful silicon IPs, the result is true innovation.
Intel set the pace for computing innovation in the PC era with Moore’s Law. As data grows exponentially, so does the need for powerful chips to move, store, and process data across a distributed landscape.
Moore’s Law is as important as ever, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. Intel is powering the data-centric era with synchronized and coarchitected advances in transistors, packaging, and chip design. No other company has our fab foundation, in-house research and development capabilities, innovation pipeline, and integrated device manufacturer advantage—a unique set of complementary capabilities that will redefine what’s possible in computing.
A microprocessor may be the most complex manufactured product made by humans. Producing it takes hundreds of steps in the world’s cleanest environment, carried out by skilled experts who are meticulously trained to move atoms and molecules.
Each microprocessor is made up of billions of tiny electrical switches called transistors. As transistors grow smaller, computing devices become smarter, faster, and more efficient. But shrinking transistors is no longer enough to deliver leaps in performance. Radical design improvements are also needed.
Smaller and Faster with 3D Transistors
With our leadership in manufacturing the fin-shaped field-effect transistor (FinFET), Intel raised the 2D transistor channel into the third dimension, greatly improving control of electrons flowing through the channel. These transistors operate at a lower voltage with lower leakage, providing an unprecedented combination of improved performance and energy efficiency. As a result, transistors are smaller, faster, and use less power than ever before. We have been continuously refining the FinFET since its introduction nearly a decade ago. We introduced our third iteration of FinFET transistors at the 10nm node, continuing our journey of refining this technology with key innovations such as Contact Over Active Gate (COAG), which moved beyond the transistor device to the metal interconnects and ultimately the cell level.
Redefining the FinFET
After years of refining the FinFET platform, we redefined it to deliver an unprecedented level of performance uplift with our new SuperFin technology.
SuperFin leverages a combination of innovations across the entire process stack, from the transistor channel to the top metal layers. A key breakthrough is a new Super MIM capacitor, which delivers a 5x increase in capacitance within the same footprint as industry standard approaches. This industry-first technology drives a voltage reduction that in combination with all of these innovations enabled nearly the equivalent performance of a full-node transition.
Accelerating Innovation
Today, we are continuing to evolve our roadmap to one that showcases new levels of innovation and moving to an accelerated pace to enable an annual cadence of process improvements.
With our new Intel 4 and Intel 3 technologies, we are fully embracing EUV lithography, which involves a highly complex optical system of lenses and mirrors that focuses a 13.5 nm wavelength of light to print incredibly small features on silicon. This is a vast improvement over prior technology that used light at a wavelength of 193nm.
And with Intel 20A, we are ushering in the angstrom era by introducing two new breakthrough technologies, PowerVia and RibbonFET. PowerVia is Intel’s unique, industry-first implementation of backside power delivery. RibbonFET, Intel’s implementation of a Gate All Around transistor, is the company’s first new transistor architecture since it pioneered FinFETs in 2011.
What’s in a Name?
Intel has realigned its process naming to provide a more accurate view of process nodes across the industry and to better reflect the balance of power-efficiency, performance, and area in future nodes. For decades, the process “node” name corresponded to the actual length of certain physical transistor features. While the industry departed from that practice many years ago, it has continued to use this historical pattern of assigning node names using decreasing numbers that evoke units of dimension, such as nanometers. Intel is refreshing its lexicon to create a clear and meaningful framework to help customers have a more accurate view of process nodes across the industry to make better-informed decisions.
