Intel executive William Grimm: Mass production of the Intel 4 process based on EUV lithography has not yet been launched in mass production plants

According to news on August 30, foreign media ascii.jp recently conducted an interview with Pat Stover, Intel’s senior director of technology development, and William Grimm, director and vice president of logic technology and development product engineering, revealing new news about Intel’s subsequent processor development.

The summary of information revealed by William Grimm is as follows:

• Currently, the Intel 4 process is only in mass production at the D1 factory in Oregon. This includes all D1C/D1D/D1X, with a total monthly output of 40,000 pcs. However, this is the sum of all process nodes, not just Intel 4's 40,000.

• Fab 34 in Ireland is the first Intel 4 mass production factory, but it is currently running test chips and has not yet reached mass production.

• There is no equivalent to, say, Intel 7+ (the minor version upgrade of Intel 7 used in Raptor Lake) (or Intel 4+).

• Unable to answer whether Intel 4 uses a dust-proof film assembly. TSMC has successfully performed EUV exposure without film, while Samsung has film. Intel used film in its early days, but the situation with Intel 4 is unclear.

Intel 4 is the first application of extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) in Intel's process. According to reverse engineering data provided by IC Knowledge, the performance of Intel 4 process is better than TSMC 5nm and close to 3nm process, but William insists that "it is difficult to compare Intel 4 with existing nodes of other foundries, so just refer to external benchmark execution own PPA”.

According to the sample shown by William, the Meteor Lake processor is quite large in size, but only the upper left CPU part is manufactured using the Intel 4 process.

Foreign media also predict that based on previously exposed wafer diagrams, even if the yield rate is 50%, each wafer can be guaranteed to produce 365 chips, and it is easy to produce 365,000 CPUs per month.

Intel will hold a two-day Innovation 2023 (Innovation 2023) event starting on September 19. The schedule of all meetings during the period has been announced, confirming that it will showcase the new generation Meteor Lake processor architecture.