Intel is strengthening its foundry business with a new $1 billion fund and an open chiplet platform, enabling ecosystem companies to develop innovative technologies across all chip architectures.

Intel announced on the 7th (local time in the US) that it will create a $1 billion fund to support the discovery of innovative technologies by startups and companies in the foundry ecosystem.

This fund, jointly invested by Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services (IFS), will be primarily invested in areas that can accelerate the speed of launch of intellectual property (IP), software tools, innovative semiconductor architectures, and advanced packaging technologies.

Intel also announced partnerships with several companies affiliated with the fund and announced key strategic industry changes, including developing modular products with an open chiplet platform and supporting designs that leverage multiple instruction set architectures (ISAs) across x86, Arm, and RISC-V.

“Our foundry customers are rapidly adopting modular design approaches to enable product differentiation and faster time to market,” said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. “Through our new investment fund and open chiplet platform, we will enable our ecosystem to develop innovative technologies across all chip architectures.”

To meet the growing global demand for cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, Intel established IFS, a core component of its IDM 2.0 strategy.

IFS offers cutting-edge packaging and process technologies in the US and Europe, while also offering a broad and differentiated intellectual property portfolio within the foundry industry, including all major instruction sets.

A robust ecosystem is needed to enable customers to design and manufacture chips based on IFS's technology.

The new innovation fund can strengthen the ecosystem through equity investments in innovative startups, strategic investments to accelerate partners' scale-up times, and ecosystem investments to develop innovative capabilities to support IFS customers.

A core part of the IFS strategy is to provide a broad range of industry-leading intellectual property optimized for Intel process technologies.

IFS is the only foundry that offers IP optimized for the industry's leading instruction sets: x86, Arm, and RISC-V.

RISC-V is a leading open-source instruction set that offers unparalleled scalability and customizability. Foundry customers are increasingly demanding expanded support for RISC-V intellectual property.

As part of its new innovation fund, Intel plans to make investments and offerings to strengthen the ecosystem and accelerate RISC-V adoption.

The fund will support innovative RISC-V companies to innovate faster through technology co-optimization, wafer shuttle prioritization, customer design support, and development board and software infrastructure.

Additionally, IFS plans to provide RISC-V intellectual property cores optimized for various markets.

IFS works with industry-leading suppliers to optimize its intellectual property for Intel process technologies to ensure optimal performance across all cores, from embedded to high-performance.

The offerings include: △Partner products built with IFS; △RISC-V cores licensed with differentiated proprietary rights; and △RISC-V-based chiplet components leveraging advanced packaging and high-speed chip-to-chip interfaces.

“Intel is a hub of innovative technologies, but not all of them originate within Intel,” said Randhir Thakur, president of Intel Foundry Solutions. “Innovation thrives in an open and collaborative environment. This $1 billion fund, created in partnership with Intel Capital, a leading venture capital firm, will bring together all of Intel’s capabilities to drive innovation in the foundry ecosystem.”