Intel's Future Lies in Foundry

choi

Tim De Chant, Intel Slipped—and Its Future Now Depends on Making Everyone Else's Chips. ars technica, Oct 20, 2021.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-pol ... eryone-elses-chips/

Note:
(a) Ars Technica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Technica  
(1998- )
(i) Latin-English dictionary:
* ars (noun feminine): "art"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ars
   ^ Compare English dictionary:
   * art (n; "from Middle English art, from Old French art, from Latin artem, accusative of ars art). Displaced native Old English cræft [meaning 'art, skill'] (Modern English craft) and Old English list [meaning 'art, craft'] (Modern English list))
   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/art
* technicus (adjective masculine; feminine: technica): "technical"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technicus
(ii) Latin grammar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_grammar  
("An adjective can come either before or after a noun, eg vir bonus or bonus vir 'a good man,' although some kinds of adjectives, such as adjectives of nationality (vir Rōmānus 'a Roman man') usually follow the noun")


(b)
(i) "Last month [Sept 27], Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger stepped to a podium on a hazy, wind-whipped day"
(ii) "Robert Maire, president of Semiconductor Advisors[, LLC]"

In its website right under its name is "Expert Strategic & Financial Advice For The Technology Industry." It is a consultancy, not on engineering, though.
(iii) "It was a brisk fall morning  [IBM to Pay Globalfoundries $1.5 Billion to Take Chip Unit. Reuters, Oct 19, 2014] in Burlington, Vermont, when Governor Peter Shumlin addressed a crowded room * * * IBM's [note: not GlobalFoundries yet] fab in Essex Junction, six miles from where [Vermont Governor (2011-2017: four consecutive terms of two years each) Peter] Shumlin stood [in Burlington (the most populous city (2020 census: 42,500), but not capital, of Vermont], employed around 4,000 people at the time, making Big Blue the largest private manufacturer in the state. * * * At one time, the plant had employed more than 8,000 people [in 1982, per en.wikipedia.org for this village; IBM started constructing at Essex Junction in 1958]"
(A) Essex Junction, Vermont
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_Junction,_Vermont  
(is a village located within the town of Essex)
(B) For name origin, see History of Essex Junction. Village of Essex Junction, undated
https://www.essexjunction.org/facts/history
("Originally part of the Essex Township decreed by the English Crown in the 18th century * * * A short distance from Hubbells Falls, two roadways connecting Burlington to points east and north formed an intersection * * * By the 1850s, the land adjacent to the road intersection formed a railroad junction connecting six different [rail] lines")

There is an Amtrak station there.
(iv) "Carver Mead, then a professor at Caltech"
(A) Carver Mead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
(1934-  (age 87); "currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at" Caltech)
(B) The English surname Mead has two origins: "from Middle English mede meadow (Old English mædwe)" and "occupational name for a brewer or seller of mead (Old English meodu), an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey"
(C) Alan Patterson (interviewer)m Oral history of Morris Chang. Computer History Museum, Aug 24, 2007
archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Chang_Morris/Chang_Morris_1.oral_history.2007.102658129.pdf

quote:

"the political leaders [in Taiwan] deserved all the credit for getting the RCA license, but that didn't mean that Taiwan entered the semiconductor industry just by licensing the technology from RCA. All it meant, this license of RCA, all it meant was that Taiwan got the then RCA current technology which was probably a generation behind the leading technology in the US then. Now, after Taiwan got it, a group of people got it, a group of people sent by ITRI, they were there for several months, I think, got it, they brought it back to Taiwan, and they continued to work on it in the laboratory, you know, small scale. It was not the business. It was not the production. And then they licensed the technology from RCA in 1975, and in 1980, which was five years later, they spun off a company. * * * And then seven years later, 1987, TSMC was started. And by 1987 the ITRI technology, which was first obtained from RCA, and then worked upon for 12 years now between '75 and '87 for twelve years, in the 12 years they managed to get another generation and a half behind. So by 1987 the ITRI technology was already two and a half generations behind the leading technology.
And, I mean, that's understandable because first of all RCA was not a first tier semiconductor company when it licensed its technology to Taiwan, to ITRI. And secondly, without a real commercial base the ITRI people, you know, certainly was limited in improving the technology, in keeping up with the pace that the other companies that are commercial companies, companies like Intel and TI and so on, and they set the pace, and ITRI couldn't keep up with the pace. So when they got the technology it was a generation behind, and when TSMC got the technology in '87 is was already two and a half generations behind the leading level." at page 11.

"A few weeks after I arrived in Taiwan ['1985年，應孫運璿之邀到臺灣擔任工業技術研究院院長' (孫運璿: 行政院長 (1978-1984)): zh.wikipedia.org], and became the President of ITRI, I was called in by Mr KT Lee [李國鼎 (1910-2001; 出生於南京市，祖籍安徽婺源; 20歲畢業於南京國立中央大學物理系; 遺體歸葬於故鄉南京普覺寺之墓園: zh.wikpedia.org], whose name you just mentioned. And he said ]in 1987 he was both 行政院政務委員 and KMT 中常委], 'Well, we want to promote a semiconductor industry in Taiwan.' Of course, they wanted to do that in 1975 also when they licensed the technology. * * * It was during that time [days after Morris Chang met KT Lee] when the idea of the pure-play foundry gelled. Now, how did the pure-play foundry come about? I think that was going to be your next question. It was really, I mean, two or three things combined together. First of all, or course, I had read some of Carver Mead's writings. Carver Mead is a prominent researcher. He wrote several important papers. In fact he published a book back in the late '70s, I think, on IC design and architecture, and he made a point that the design part could be separated from the technology. But he didn't advocate the advent of pure-play foundries, but he did make the point which would lead to the conclusion that you could start up a pure-play foundry. But the market really didn't appear to be there for a pure-play foundry. So I had read Carver Mead, so Carver Mead's writings were know to me even when I was at Texas Instruments. But the only trouble is, of course, that there didn't appear to be a stable market for that kind of pure-play foundry. So in other words, one thread of thought as I paused and thought about the task that Mr. K.T. Lee gave to me he wanted me to present a business plan, he wanted me to start a semiconductor company." at pages 11-12.

"I had been in the semiconductor business for three decades [in US] before I came to Taiwan. * * * So I knew how competitive it was, and how difficult it would be to carve out a niche for a new Taiwan company. So that was the second thread of thought. The third thread of thought was I paused to try to examine what we have got in Taiwan. And my conclusion was that very little, you know. What strengths have we got [in Taiwan]? The conclusion was very little." at pages 12.
(vi) " 'What is in the customer's interests?' an IBM executive said at the time. 'Any easy ability to second source parts. Some other fabs want to be the only source.' "

The verb second is defined in Lexico.omas "formally support or endorse" a motion, but here judging from the context, the verb means has a second source
(vii) "In 2002, IBM had another reason to sell its excess capacity [to promote foundry business]—its $3 billion cutting-edge fab in East Fishkill [Modern Dutch noun feminine kil creek], New York [which started when IBM purchase farmland there in 1962]. No other project in company history had cost as much, and Big Blue, needing to recoup some of its investment, redoubled its efforts to win foundry customers. By the next year, the company was the third-largest foundry by revenue—still well behind TSMC but with a roster of blue-chip clients that included Sony, Qualcomm, Nvidia [founded in 1993], and AMD. Its fab technologies were the envy of the industry."

Who was No 2?

Richard Ball, IBM Foundry Business Grows by a Third. Electronics Weekly, June 11, 2003.
https://www.electronicsweekly.co ... by-a-third-2003-06/
(viii) "Apple, which struggled with IBM's hand-me-down technology. In the early 2000s, IBM designed and supplied Apple with the PowerPC G5, a derivative of the POWER4 server processor. It worked well in Apple's spacious Power Mac towers [tower = server], but Apple struggled to put the hot, inefficient chip in a laptop."
(A) Power Macintosh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh  
("later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers" 1994-2006)
, whose top photo showed a server, and a photo with caption: "A complete Power Mac G4 Cube system." You can see that there is no cord among the server, screen and key pad.

Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011) was away from Apple 1885-1997.
(B) Apparently the writer that Power Mac G5 was a computer chip, when it was a personal computer in fact.

Power Mac G5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5
("from 2003 to 2006 as part of the Power Mac series. * * * [was] one of only three computers in Apple's lineup to utilize the PowerPC 970 CPU, the others being the iMac G5 and the Xserve G5")
(ix) "But then in 2015, it [Intel] slipped. Intel announced that chips made on its 10 nm node would be delayed. In 2017, it announced another delay. Soon the industry titan wasn’t just even with its competition, it was behind.

Intel is currently in 14/10 nm node. Rumor has it that its yield with 10 nm remains problematic.
(x) "H-S Philip Wong 黃漢森, a professor at Stanford who led TSMC's research and development from 2018–2020"

H-S Philip Wong, Willard R and Inez Kerr Bell Professor. Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University, undated
https://web.stanford.edu/~hspwong/
("Education: B.Sc. Hons. (1982) University of Hong Kong, MS (1983) State University of New York, Stony Brook, and PhD (1988) Lehigh University * * * From 1988 to 2004, he was with the IBM TJ Watson Research Center * * * From 2018 to 2020, he was on leave from Stanford and was the Vice President of Corporate Research at TSMC")
(xi)  "Tsu-Jae King Liu, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley"
(i) Tsu-Jae King Liu
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/king.html  
("received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Member of Research Staff in 1992, to research and develop high-performance thin-film transistor technologies for flat-panel display applications. In 1996 she joined the faculty of the University of California, at Berkeley, where she now holds the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Distinguished Professorship in Microelectronics")
(ii) Tsu-Jae King Liu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsu-Jae_King_Liu  
("Liu is a first-generation American born in Ithaca, New York to Taiwanese parents who were graduate students at Cornell University. Her father's research was in the area of earthquake prediction and as such she spent the majority of her childhood and was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area")
(iii) Her Chinese name is 劉金智潔. Her husband is Dr David Kuan-Yu Liu (Chinese name unknown; consultant in semiconductor).


(c) "Chenming Hu, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and former chief technology officer at TSMC. * * * Large foundries have dozens or hundreds of customers, Hu said, which encourages them to take smaller steps because there’s always an interested customer. 'When you take bigger steps, there's more chance of slipping than taking a larger number of smaller steps,' he said. It's also easier for companies to recover from stumbles.  Intel has historically taken big leaps that attempt to mirror Moore's law * * * 'Developing a new-generation technology is tremendously difficult,' Hu said. 'Intel falling behind TSMC and Samsung in the very leading edge technology can be traced to the fact that Intel did not participate in the foundry [this is new perspective, but I do not know whether it is true].'"
(i) Chenming Hu, TSMC Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, undated.
https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/

UC Berkeley right after the professorship but before the department is due to "Professor Emeritus" is of a university, in all American universities I am aware of. MIT and a few others have "university professor" instead, high than a mere professor.
(ii) These two persons of the same names (Chinese and English) are identical.
(A) 胡正明（Chenming Calvin Hu）. 外籍院士, 中国科学院学部, undated
www.casad.cas.cn/sourcedb_ad_cas ... 090624_1808892.html
(B) Chenming Hu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenming_Hu  
("Chenming Calvin Hu (Chinese: 胡正明 * * * born 1947) is a Taiwanese-American electronic engineer * * * Hu completed his bachelor's degree at the National Taiwan University in Taipei in 1968, and completed master's and doctoral degrees at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970 and 1973, respectively.  He is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976 (currently as a Professor Emeritus). * * * He was one of the developers of the FinFET * * * Hu was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 * * * Between 2001 and 2004 Hu was the chief technology officer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company")

In 1947 "生于中华民国北平市，籍贯江苏金坛 * * * 原台积电技术首席执行官。  胡正明于1947年出生于北京，于襁褓中随家人前往台湾。  1968年毕业于国立台湾大学电机工程系 * * * 1973年获柏克莱加州大学博士学位，毕业后前往麻省理工学院任助理教授。1976年起，任教于柏克莱加州大学电子工程与计算机科学系.* * 胡正明是电气电子工程师学会（IEEE）会士 [Fellow] （1989年）、美国国家工程院院士（1997年）、中央研究院院士（2004年）、工业技术研究院院士（2016年）、中国科学院外籍院士（2007年）"  zh.wikipedia.org for 胡正明.


(d) "Historically, leading US firms have either functioned as IDMs that design and make chips or as fabless designers that outsource the production to another company, usually in Asia. Part of that is because much of the profit in computer chips comes from designing and selling them, not making them. TSMC's success as a pure-play foundry 'is almost historically anomalous,' said Jennifer Kuan, deputy director of innovation and research[, College of Business (not engineering),] at California State University—Monterey Bay. Not only that, but 'TSMC has shown that it's a profitable business,' ​she added. Many people hadn’t thought it could be."
(i) Meet Our Team. Startup Monterey Bay, Institute ​of Innovation and Research, College of Business, CSU —Monterey Bay
https://www.startupmontereybay.com/about/
("Dr Kuan is a member of the CSUMB entrepreneurship and economics faculty with a PhD from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. * * * In addition to her PhD from Berkeley, Jenny holds a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University")
(ii) She does not have a Chinese name, and presumably was born in US.