Intel Custom Foundry doesn't like to speak of its operations, though

Feb 23, 2012 20:11 GMT  ·  By

Just yesterday (February 22, 2012), we saw that Intel had begun making 22nm chips for a different company, and this led some to the question of just what chipzilla was after.

Until about two years ago, Intel made processors only for itself, but then it established the Intel Custom Foundry, which slowly began to accept contracts from other companies.

Tabula is just the latest to have signed a contract with the Santa Clara, California-based company.

It is not altogether clear why Intel has chosen this road, beyond the fact that the company doesn't want to waste production facilities.

Since using its factories fully would lead to oversupply and, thus, waste of money and time, it is putting them to work on other projects, even some that it has no direct stake in.

“We formed Intel Custom Foundry a couple of years ago. This is a nascent program that we are taking a slow and deliberate approach to building,” Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, according to X-bit Labs.

“We believe we have world class manufacturing capabilities that have served us well over the years. Given that expertise we believe we there could be an opportunity for future growth for Intel.”

Besides Tabula, Intel has only one other, known, customer: Achronix. Both use advanced field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

The chip giant supposedly has other clients, but it refuses to say who they are for some reason. It may have to do with the “steady and cautious” approach to running a foundry business.

“Two of our customers have announced that we are working with them, Tabula from earlier this week and Achronix in 2010. We have other agreements, but those customers have elected not to make them public,” said the spokesman for Intel.

“We also understand that running a foundry business is can be quite different than being an integrated device manufacturer (IDM). So we are taking a slow and steady approach to insure that we can serve our foundry customers while taking advantage of our world class manufacturing processes. Given this slow and steady approach it would be a stretch to say that we are trying to compete head-to-head with GlobalFoundries or TSMC.”