Intel Corp. is launching a $1 billion fund to invest in technologies and companies that can help customers of its chip foundry business bring new processors to market faster.

The fund was announced this morning. It’s the result of a collaboration between Intel’s venture capital arm and its recently launched Intel Foundry Services, or IFS, business. The IFS business will use the chipmaker’s semiconductor fabs to produce processors for other companies, such as cloud providers, based on their own custom designs.

Intel’s new $1 billion fund is only one component of a broader strategy to support the growth of IFS. In conjunction with the announcement of the fund today, Intel detailed a number of new chip industry partnerships. It also disclosed that IFS is developing an “open chiplet platform” in collaboration with multiple cloud providers. 

One key focus of Intel’s new fund will be a chip design concept known as system-on-package. A system-on-package is a processor that combines multiple types of computing modules in a single product. Such a processor might combine, for example, central processing unit cores with a graphics card.

The concept is similar to the systems-on-chip, or SOCs, that power devices such as smartphones. SOCs also include multiple types of computing modules. But whereas an SOC is a single silicon die, a system-on-package processor comprises multiple, separate silicon dies linked together. Intel and other major chipmakers are adopting the system-on-package approach because it simplifies tasks such as manufacturing.

The technology is an important part of Intel’s plans for its IFS chip foundry business and, by extension, the newly announced $1 billion fund. The company envisions working with customers to manufacture system-on-package processors. Intel is focusing on, among other use cases, system-on-package products that incorporate the RISC-V instruction set architecture. 

Intel is planning “investments and offerings that will strengthen the ecosystem and help drive further adoption of RISC-V,” it said today. The company’s investments will span several areas. 

First, Intel will back early-stage startups developing technologies that could be useful for customers of its IFS foundry business. Second, Intel will make “strategic investments” in partners to help them scale their operations. The third major focus area for Intel will be making “ecosystem investments” to advance goals such as developing new technology standards for the chip industry. 

As part of its ecosystem strategy, the company is joining RISC-V International, a nonprofit organization that supports the development of the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Intel also announced partnerships with four companies that offer RISC-V chips. The companies are Andes Technology Ltd., Esperanto Technologies Inc., SiFive Inc. and Ventana Micro Systems Inc.

Intel will work with its partners to develop validated RISC-V cores that customers of its foundry business can easily integrate into their chip designs. The cores will be optimized for different market segments, Intel said.

“Foundry customers are rapidly embracing a modular design approach to differentiate their products and accelerate time to market,” said Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger. “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.”

In the long term, Intel said, it hopes to partner with fellow chipmakers to develop an open standard for system-on-package processors. The standard is envisioned as a “die-to-die interconnect.” It would simplify the task of exchanging data among the different types of computing modules integrated into a system-on-package processor.

On the occasion, Intel shared technical details about the work of its IFS foundry business. The company said IFS is collaborating with multiple cloud providers on an open chiplet platform for creating processors with multiple types of computing modules aboard. The platform is seeing “strong momentum with customers who value the ability to rapidly integrate accelerators optimized to new and evolving data center workloads,” Intel said.

One reason why the industry is investing in system-on-package processors is that the technology can potentially help increase data center performance. If two compute modules are part of the same system-on-package processor, the distance between them is shorter than if they were implemented as two separate chips. That means data can travel between the modules faster, which improves performance. 

Image: Intel