At least there’s one piece of good news for Intel as they announced a major milestone for its 18A chip fabrication process.
The upcoming Panther Lake processor for client markets as well as Clearwater Forest server processors have been officially confirmed to power on and booted into operating systems. With this achievement, Team Blue is happy to reveal that the schedule for productions will begin in H1 2025 for external customers.
Specifically, they revealed the new 18A Process Design Kit (PDK) 1.0 last month in an effort to attract more clients to utilize their foundry service and RibbonFET gate-all-around transistor architecture and PowerVia backside power delivery to produce next-generation chips. On the other hand, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and Intellectual Property (IP) partners are currently rushing to get their offerings updated for final production design support.
Intel also provided additional indicators for 18A that include Panther Lake achieving targeted frequency in DDR memory performance while Clearwater Forest is poised to recapture market share thanks to the high-performance solution integrating RibbonFET, PowerVia, and Foveros Direct 3D for enhanced density and power management in addition to being the spearhead of Intel 3-T base-die technology that offers better performance-per-watt improvements, transistor density, and cell utilization.
As for what makes Intel 18A different can be extracted from the info on RibbonFET and PowerVia as the former enables precise control over electrical current in the transistor channel, facilitating further miniaturization of chip components and reducing power leakage while the latter optimizes signal routing by isolating power delivery from the front side of the wafer, thus minimizing resistance and improving power efficiency.
