SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP284: Current Capabilities and Future Focus at Intel Foundry Services with Kevin O’Buckley

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Dan is joined by Kevin O’Buckley, senior vice president and general manager of Foundry Services at Intel Corporation. In this role, he is responsible for driving continued growth for Intel Foundry and its differentiated systems foundry offerings, which go beyond traditional wafer fabrication to include packaging, chiplet… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of SemiWiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Kevin O'Buckley, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Foundry Services at Intel Corporation. In this role, he is responsible for driving continued growth for Intel Foundry and its differentiated systems Foundry offerings, which go beyond traditional wafer fabrication to include packaging, chiplet standards and software,

as well as US and Europe based capacity. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin. It's great to talk to you again. Hey, Dan, thanks. Likewise, thrilled to be here. Always excited to catch up with you. So let's start with your background in the hardware and semiconductor business. How did you get your start? So I've been my entire career, frankly, in and around semiconductors

a little over 25 years now. I started back at IBM Microelectronics and I was working actually in technology development and manufacturing. So early in my. And I was working actually in technology development and manufacturing. So early in my career, I was a fab person. I was working on initial deployment of Copper Interconnect as we were driving some of the technology innovations at the time. I moved within IBM to a variety

of different job opportunities. I think like many of us just blessed to be at the time in a large company with a lot of different job opportunities. I think like many of us just blessed to be at the time in a large company with a lot of different opportunities. So I find myself doing product design and development and then also find myself in some business and sales roles. So just have been very fortunate to have an opportunity to spend time while all in the semiconductor industry in a variety of different roles.

And of course, while I said I started at IBM Microelectronics, that's a team in a business that evolved as the business evolved. So I landed with that team at Global Foundries and then as part of that ASIC business, then joined Marvell when that was spun out of Global Foundries. Great. And why join Intel Foundry? I love this one. I think, as I reflect on the last quarter century or so,

one of the biggest macro dynamic that's happening within our industry has been a story of consolidation. Both the number of customers in the industry, but maybe a little more acutely, the number of suppliers in the industry. Think of a little more acutely, the number of suppliers in the industry. Think of how many companies are actually manufacturing wafers or doing packaging in our industry right now. There's just been an extraordinary amount of consolidation. In my most recent roles as part of a Fabless company, I find myself actually in some extremely

difficult positions during the COVID pandemic and other supply chain crises we were having at the time, really struggling to deliver for my customers and sort of in a more personal role, found myself really wanting to try and find if there's a way I personally could play a role in the industry and doing something

about the lack of geographic diversity and supplier diversity we have. And it's particularly acute at the leading edge. And as I sort of surveyed, hey, where could I potentially go make an impact? Intel Foundry really stood tall as an opportunity to participate in a team that was doing amazing things. Well, I agree completely. I've been in the supply chain for most of my career and everybody needs options. So what inspires you about the future of this business?

I think, you know, in terms of inspiration, Dan, I guess I would give you the same answer I probably would have given you 25 years ago. And my perspective on the semiconductor industry is that it really is at the heart of a lot of the change in our world today. And I mean change both from a traditional technology standpoint, you know, what are the new whiz bang gizmos that you can buy, but maybe much more impactfully, you know, what are the tools that sort of, you know, allow us to connect, you connect, drive our social connection, enable infrastructure? I really truly feel that semiconductor are at the heart of our world.

And that's what, despite all the challenges of living and working in this crazy industry, it's what keeps me motivated and inspired. The extent to which we can participate in the semiconductor industry, but really be at the forefront of so many of the things It's what keeps me motivated and inspired. The extent to which we can participate in the semiconductor industry, but really be at the forefront of so many of the innovations that are driving the world around us is just genuinely

inspiring and exciting for me. I get energy from it. So from the big picture, why did Intel decide to open up its foundry to outside customers? And what does it mean for those customers, the ecosystem and the semiconductor industry? Yeah, I think so. Intel's decision to really full force go into a traditional foundry business, meaning we're making our technologies and both our manufacturing technologies and our design enablement technologies available to external customers was in many ways

sort of an existential decision for Intel and I think for the industry. For the same reason that we've seen consolidation that we were chatting about earlier, Dan, in the industry, it costs now 20 to $30 billion just to build a single fabrication facility for advanced node semiconductors. And no matter the scale of any company on planet Earth, the only way to do that in a

reasonable business risk-managed sense is to have some reasonable diversity of customers and markets that you're serving to fully utilize that extraordinary investment. And I think for Intel, from an inside out standpoint, it was an existential, hey, we need to make sure we've got a business to sustain the investments that are required for Foundry. And from an outside in standpoint, my perspective is,

tying back to the consolidation discussion we had, Dan, it's existential for the industry as well for, for there to be more suppliers, you know, providing these types of technologies. So I think whether you're inside out or outside in Intel opening up its foundry business and capabilities externally was the right thing, I think for both Intel and the industry. Yeah, personally, I think it's critical. I really do. So with Intel 18a coming up, what do you see as the main benefits for developing on this platform?

18a for us, Dan, is a restoration of our capability to truly have state-of-the-art silicon technology, technology that stands as a peer to the best available in the industry. So, and frankly, it's been a number of years since we at Intel have been able to say that with the right level of credibility. So for us, that's what 18A means.

And the benefits for our customers of developing on this platform is really about getting access to fundamental new technologies as soon as they're available. There are two major elements of the technology we call 18A. It is for us at Intel, our first gate all around technologies combined with the industry's first backside metal technology. So bringing those two technology elements together in Intel 18A gives customers using that technology, power, performance and area advantages

that they take advantage of in product. So think of that as performance per watt or performance or power per square millimeter of silicon. And by the way, we're doing it in a geographically diverse way. We are right now manufacturing 18A. We're bringing up our first products at our facility in Oregon and simultaneously bringing up that technology at our new facilities in Arizona. So we're also manufacturing these technologies in, you know, I think a more geographically diverse way for our customers. at our new facilities in Arizona. So we're also manufacturing these technologies in I think a more geographically diverse way

for our customers. And many of our customers see that as a critical value. Yeah, I agree. To enable customers designs on Intel technology, it requires embracing ecosystem partnerships. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, this was a big change for Intel, honestly, as a company,

Dan. The way I would say it is this, that the fabulous and foundry ecosystem over the last 20 plus years has developed, frankly, an extraordinarily effective model of developing technologies, developing PDKs or the design enablement collateral for those technologies. And then there's a massive ecosystem of companies

like Cadence or Synopsys or Mentor that develop both IP as well as tools that are optimized to that technology. And that essentially, we call it an ecosystem, the industry calls it an ecosystem, but it's really about enabling these incredibly complex technologies that we develop to be used for our customers. And for us at Intel, frankly, we have a history of doing this all ourselves, right?

The history of Intel as an integrated device manufacturer was to develop its own design enablement, develop its own IP. And to a certain extent, and for many years, there was a perspective that that provided Intel a competitive advantage. But the simple reality is, for the entire rest of the industry,

there was innovation happening, and frankly, an expectation of how to use technologies as a fabless company, that Intel had to either embrace or simply not be viable as an external foundry. So working, developing our relationship with those companies has been critical to frankly advancing our state of the art inside of Intel

and making our technologies accessible in ways our customers expect. Right, yeah, the requirements for a foundry can be challenging. So how is Intel Foundry working with the ecosystem to address these specific challenges? I think there's two elements of it. The first embracing of the ecosystem really comes

in ensuring that we have in the Intel Foundry offering everything our customers need. So think of that as not just traditional, hey, I need transistors and I need backend metal stacks, but I also need a, hey, I need a PCI interface or I need an HBM memory interface or I need an SRAM memory compiler that achieves a certain level of density and performance.

And these ecosystem partners have been critical as early partners in our technology in developing their IP and their platforms to our technology so that our customers can have what they need. The second area for investment and differentiation is a lot of the EDA tool vendors that are also a key part of this ecosystem develop tools for, let let's say place and route

or timing closure or design for test capabilities. And while the user interface, a perspective of a Fabless company using those tools, they want that to be consistent, foundry provider to foundry provider, technology provider to technology provider. But we as a foundry provider to foundry provider, technology provider to technology provider. But we as a foundry also want to ensure that those tools are enabled with

our technologies in a differentiated way. I'll give you an example, backside power is a critical feature of our 18A technology that gives customers who take advantage of it, power performance and area advantages, helps them close timing more effectively. It delivers power in a more competitive fashion to the transistors. But our customers don't really want to have to do backside power, if you know what I mean.

They don't want to have people that are hand laying out circuits to take advantage of backside power. They want to use a synopsis or cadence or a Siemens tool and click a button. And they want all that to happen behind the scenes and our partners with the ecosystems to enable our differentiation, but in a way that is seamless to our customers has been absolutely critical for us.

Right. So last question, Kevin, what innovations and advancements do you expect to see in the coming months? This is a tremendous amount. I think maintaining the pace of innovation in our industry has been fundamentally about radical new things that our best scientists and engineers can continue to develop. There are a few I'd point to that stand out to me in the near term, Dan. I've talked a lot about 18a and gate all around and backside power, but the reality is all of that technology

really needs to be combined, in particular for the most advanced compute and networking applications with advanced packaging. So I think a lot of the innovations, the front-leaning innovations that we'll continue to see from our industry in the coming months, quarters, and years will also be in the area of advanced packaging. How we enable much, much greater density of both compute and interconnect at highest density and lowest power is driving tremendous structural innovation in our packaging and test technologies.

So you'll continue to see innovation there from companies like Intel and our foundry and OSAT competitors in the industry. And I think you should also expect to see continued innovation in the fundamentals of the silicon technology. So, you know, next generation integrations for backside power. And you'll also see innovations, you know, we moved quite quickly from planar devices to FinFETs to now gate all around devices.

And the whole next generation of transistor architectures are already in many of our research and development labs. And I expect not in the coming months and quarters, but in the coming years, we'll also see sustained innovation on how transistors are actually continued to scale. Great. So the event is next month.

I go to all these events. I'm so looking forward to the Intel Foundry event at the end of April, And I'll see you there. Likewise, Dan, really, really excited to see you, excited for the whole team to join us at the end of April. Thanks again. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening, and have a great day.