More details about Intel’s foundry plans for MediaTek are revealed

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Earlier, Intel and MediaTek announced that they would establish a strategic partnership, and the latter would use the former’s foundry services to manufacture chips. The agreement aims to help MediaTek build a more balanced and resilient supply chain. It is understood that MediaTek plans to use Intel’s foundry services to produce a variety of chips for a series of intelligent edge devices, using a process called “Intel 16”. This is an improved version of the 22FFL process node, optimized for low-cost and low-power chips.

MediaTek Filogic 380 single-chip Wi-Fi 7 platform

According to relevant media reports, more details about Intel’s OEM plan for MediaTek have recently been exposed. This time MediaTek sought Intel’s foundry services to produce chips for digital TV and wireless network access, and most of them are not even from MediaTek itself, but its subsidiaries or related companies. These companies design various chips for low-end smart TVs, networking, and Bluetooth. Although MediaTek itself has related chips, they are often positioned in high-end models.

In fact, the process nodes used by these chips have production capacity, whether TSMC or UMC and even some small foundries have production capacity. MediaTek’s move has also sparked concerns among local industry insiders and authorities that these orders will make resources more concentrated, and some smaller fabs are likely to lose these orders.

Previously, TrendForce said that there has been a wave of order cancellations in wafer foundries, and they have begun to feel the pressure that customers may cancel a large number of orders, and the utilization rate of production capacity has declined. With the impact of inflation and the uncertain economic outlook, the capacity utilization rate of some process nodes may drop significantly.

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