Intel Discontinues the Custom Foundry Business!

By SemiWiki

December 17, 2018

After mentioning what I heard at IEDM 2018, that Intel was officially closing the merchant foundry business as an aside in a SemiWiki forum discussion, I got a lot of email responses so let me clarify. Honestly I did not think it was a big surprise. Intel Custom Foundry was an ill conceived idea (my opinion) from the very start and was not successful by any measures. To be clear, it is not something I just heard, it is something I have verified through multiple sources so I believe it to be true, absolutely.

Just a little background, we started blogging about Intel in the early days of SemiWiki and have posted 202 Intel related blogs that as of today have been viewed 2,8164,423 times which is an average of 13,943 per blog. Big numbers in the semiconductor blogging world in my experience. Intel has a very large group of entrenched supporters with even more naysayers that are not easily swayed so there are plenty of blog comments, some of which had to be deleted. My argument against Intel opening up their leading edge manufacturing facilities to the fabless community was that it would be a distraction from Intel’s core competency of making microprocessors. As we know, ecosystem is everything with the foundry business and that takes time, money, and technical intimacy, three things that Intel seemed to greatly underestimate.

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