Take TSMC long-term customers Intel will OEM chips for MediaTek

On July 25, Intel and MediaTek announced a strategic partnership in which Intel will supply chips to MediaTek through its Foundry Division (IFS).

Intel did not disclose details of the partnership or how many chips it will produce for MediaTek, saying only that MediaTek plans to use Intel's process technology to make a variety of chips for a range of smart end products. The company also said that the first products will be produced in the next 18 to 24 months, using a more mature chip process, namely Intel 16 (formerly "22FFL" process, a traditional process optimized for low-power devices).

Randhir Thakur, president of Intel's foundry business unit, said MediaTek, one of the fabless chip design companies driving more than 2 billion smart devices annually, is an excellent partner for the unit as it enters its next phase of development; and Intel has the advanced process technology and capacity resources located in different regions to help MediaTek deliver the next wave of 1 billion devices across multiple applications. connected devices across multiple applications.

MediaTek said that after working with Intel on 5G data cards, it will focus on the fast-growing global smart devices and further cooperate with Intel on mature process wafer manufacturing. MediaTek also stressed that the company adopts a multi-supplier strategy, and the cooperation with Intel will help enhance the company's capacity supply for mature processes, while high-end processes will continue to maintain a close partnership with TSMC without any changes.

It is expected that the cooperation reached by Intel in the foundry business is the first time Intel has snatched a major customer from TSMC, which will inevitably intensify the competition with TSMC and Samsung.

Recently, consumer electronics demand has been significantly cooled, chip prices have also begun to decline, but foundry manufacturers have not loosened the chip foundry offer, TSMC has even planned for next year will be raised by 6%, making the chip design manufacturers not only face product price reductions, and even face the dilemma of rising costs.

A number of semiconductor analysts believe that MediaTek, although only the mature process chip to TSMC foundry, TSMC's substantive impact is not significant, but in Intel's participation, the foundry market competition is more intense, helping MediaTek in the market pricing to master the right to speak.

In addition to MediaTek, Intel is still working to expand its foundry business customers, including Amazon, Qualcomm and others. In an interview in March this year, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told Interface News that Nvidia is interested in considering foundry chips by Intel.

Intel has previously been the IDM (refers to the integration of chip design, manufacturing and packaging in one) model of semiconductor manufacturers, only in March 2021 officially announced the establishment of the Foundry Division (IFS), the foundry clear as one of the company's future core business. In order to narrow the gap with the head foundry companies in the foundry scale and experience in serving external customers, on February 15 this year, Intel announced a $5.4 billion acquisition of Hightower Semiconductor to increase the foundry code. Intel CEO Kissinger set the goal for the company to become the second largest foundry by 2030.

Intel's first-quarter earnings report showed that its foundry business achieved revenue of $283 million, up 175 percent year-on-year; operating loss was $31 million, compared with a loss of $34 million in the same period last year. Intel CFO Zinsner said Intel is investing more in the field to strengthen the wafer foundry services to external customers.