A bit greater than a yr after he took the reins of Intel’s formidable bid for semiconductor contract manufacturing, Stuart Pann is retiring whereas handing over the cost to Kevin O’Buckley. The transition occurred on Monday, 13 Might, and it as soon as extra raised questions in regards to the future viability of Intel’s third-party foundry enterprise.
Pann, a 35-year firm veteran, joined Intel through the heydays of the PC revolution in 1981. He returned to the Santa-Clara, California-based semiconductor agency in 2021 to steer the chip manufacturing division, Intel Foundry Companies (IFS). He changed Intel Foundry’s first chief, Randhir Thakur, who later grew to become CEO and managing director of Tata Electronics, the electronics manufacturing arm of Indian conglomerate Tata Group.
Determine 1 Pann, presently in a help function for a easy transition, will retire on the finish of this month. Supply: Intel
Now O’Buckley replaces Pann, and it’s a déjà vu of Thakur-to-Pann handover a yr in the past. As an example, through the first quarter of 2024, Intel Foundry reported income of $4.4 billion, which was down by $462 million in comparison with the primary quarter of 2023. That’s primarily attributed to decrease revenues from back-end companies and product samples.
Pann—who left the corporate only some months after Intel Foundry marked the official launch of the manufacturing enterprise as an unbiased entity to compete with the likes of TSMC and Samsung—arrange Intel’s IDM 2.0 Acceleration Workplace (IAO) to information the implementation of an inside foundry mannequin. IAO carefully works with Intel’s enterprise items to help the corporate’s inside foundry mannequin.
Intel Foundry, which goals to maneuver past conventional foundry choices and set up itself because the world’s first open-system foundry, faces big technical and business challenges. That features combining wafer fabrication, superior course of and packaging know-how, chiplet requirements, software program, and meeting and take a look at capabilities in a unified semiconductor ecosystem.
O’Buckley inherits these challenges. He comes from Marvell, the place he led the corporate’s customized chips enterprise as senior VP for the Customized, Compute and Storage Group. O’Buckley got here to Marvell in 2019 by way of its acquisition of Avera Semiconductor, a 1,000-person chip design firm that traces its roots to IBM, which offloaded it to GlobalFoundries earlier than it was bought to Marvell. O’Buckley led Avera’s divestiture from GlobalFoundries.
Determine 2 Like his predecessor, O’Buckley will report on to CEO Pat Gelsinger. Supply: Intel
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who has guess Intel’s revival bid on organising an unbiased fab enterprise, acknowledges that Intel Foundry continues to be far away from profitability because of the massive up-front funding wanted to ramp it up. Nonetheless, time isn’t on Gelsinger’s facet, that means a swift turnaround plan is to ensure that O’Buckley.
O’Buckley is an outsider, a plus at Intel, the place staff are identified to have stayed lengthy years; his experience within the customized chips enterprise can even be an asset at Intel Foundry. Subsequent, throughout his stint at IBM, he spearheaded the corporate’s improvement of 22- and 14-nm FinFET applied sciences. As Gelsinger places it, he has a novel mix of experience in each foundry and fabless corporations.
Now comes the robust half, execution.
Associated Content material
