Rinse and Repeat for Intel 14A

“I think the challenge around 18A was two things. One, we tried to do too much at once,” said Zinsner, “and it took a while to get that settled. And I think second is, we were trying to play performance and yield and trying to improve both at the same time. It was like trying to fly the plane and fix the wing at the same time, basically.”

18A, he said, was initially expected to be production-ready by late 2024 and ramp toward volume manufacturing in 2025. However the first product did not arrive till January 2026.

After Pat Gelsinger left, added Zinsner, “ they really just focused on first, stabilising performance. And so they stabilise performance. Then once you’ve got your performance stabilised, then all you do is you work yield every month.”

“The second thing that we did when Lip-Bu joined is we really opened up our data to our vendors to really help us learn things that we could do to improve yield and that made a dramatic difference,” said Zinsner, “once we fixed that, we really started to get some feedback into what we could do to improve. And then it was just our team just grinding it out every month.”

On 14A, Zinsner said: “we have a more aggressive plan for 14A than 18A. When you look at kind of yield and performance measures at this point in time and maturity of 14A compared to that same moment in time for 18A, we’re ahead.”

“Now it’s just a little bit of a rinse and repeat,” said Zinsner, “I mean it will be a lot easier to do 14A because it’s just using a lot of the gate-all-around and backside power and so forth that we implemented in 18A.”