Intel has announced the creation of a new $1 billion fund which will help start-ups trying to bring new technologies to the foundry ecosystem. According to the company, the fund will strengthen the ecosystem by providing equity investments for start-ups, strategic investments to accelerate partner scale-up, and ecosystem investments to “develop disruptive capabilities supporting IFS (Intel Foundry Services) customers”.
Commenting on the new fund, Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO, said:
“Foundry customers are rapidly embracing a modular design approach to differentiate their products and accelerate time to market. Intel Foundry Services is well-positioned to lead this major industry inflection. With our new investment fund and open chiplet platform, we can help drive the ecosystem to develop disruptive technologies across the full spectrum of chip architectures.”
Explaining why such funds are important, the president of Intel Foundry Services, Randhir Thakur said that while Intel is an “innovation powerhouse” it also realises that some innovative ideas will be found at other companies so it wanted to ensure they have the money to deliver on the projects they’re working on.
Aside from the fund, Intel also announced that it was joining RISC-V International, the body that supports the RISC-V instruction set architecture and extensions. By joining this group, Intel wants to ensure that RISC-V runs well on Intel Foundry Services silicon across all types of cores.
