Intel and MediaTek form a partnership
Intel and MediaTek today announced a strategic partnership in which MediaTek will use advanced process technology from Intel’s foundry services to make chips. The agreement aims to help MediaTek build a more balanced and resilient supply chain.
“As one of the world’s leading fabless chip designers powering more than 2 billion devices a year, MediaTek is a terrific partner for IFS as we enter our next phase of growth,” said IFS President Randhir Thakur. “We have the right combination of advanced process technology and geographically diverse capacity to help MediaTek deliver the next billion connected devices across a range of applications.”
NS Tsai, corporate senior vice president of Platform Technology & Manufacturing Operations at MediaTek, said, “MediaTek has long adopted a multi-sourcing strategy. We have an existing 5G data card business partnership with Intel, and now extend our relationship to manufacturing smart edge devices through Intel Foundry Services. With its commitment to major capacity expansions, IFS provides value to MediaTek as we seek to create a more diversified supply chain. We look forward to building a long-term partnership to serve the fast-growing demand for our products from customers across the globe.”
MediaTek, which makes more than 2 billion chips a year, currently uses TSMC for most of its foundry services, and it’s unclear how many of those products will go to Intel’s foundries in the future. MediaTek will use the Intel 16 node to manufacture chips, which is an improved version of the 22FFL node, a process optimized for low-cost and low-power chips, but still delivering high performance, while the chip design is simpler to speed up time to market. Intel 16, on the other hand, modernized the 22FFL technology and added support for third-party chip design tools.
