Intel Foundry Direct Connect. Lowering 18A Expectations, Moving Away From Copy Exactly? What's Going On?

Copy Exactly has been the at the heart of Intel's success for three decades. Now, it is to be scrapped. That's weird.

On April 29, Intel hosted the latest in a series of “Direct Connect” events, this time focusing on the company’s Foundry progress and plans, details here. Newly minted CEO Lip Bu Tan (LBT) opened the event. He was followed on stage by Naga Chandrasekaran, a recent hire (~9 months) from Micron who now appears to be in charge of everything to do with Intel Foundry:

Kevin O’Buckley, GM of Intel Foundry and also a recent hire (<~2 months), was the final speaker at the event. Rather curiously, Navid Shahriari, who was tagged by the company last October as the long term successor to Ann Kelleher, posted about his presentation at the event on LinkedIn. Yet he didn’t feature in the lineup and the updates he posted about were covered instead by Mr. Chandrasekaran.

We wrote about the appointment of Ms Kelleher’s long term successor here:

In that article, we noted a the following two points:

“Ann isn’t going anywhere. Given the importance of TD (technology development), we have a robust long-term succession planning process,”

In my opinion, Intel is experiencing problems with their Intel 4 and Intel 3 process nodes. This is why they have been forced to continue outsourcing to TSMC.

So, Ms Kelleher ”isn’t going anywhere” has now changed to Ms. Kelleher is “retiring from Intel”. This had been previously rumoured back in March, but has now been confirmed by Mr. Chandrasekaran during his section of the Direct Connect keynote.

While on the topic of executive departures, Intel yesterday also announced the departure of its Chief Commercial Officer, Christoph Schell, details here.

On April 28, 2025, Christopher Schell, Executive Vice President, Chief Commercial Officer, and General Manager of Sales, Marketing and Communications, notified Intel of his decision to resign, effective as of June 30, 2025, in order to pursue another career opportunity.

As far as problems with Intel 4&3 are concerned, this would now appear to be the case based on what we just heard from Mr. Chandrasekaran. More on this anon.

Overall, the event was largely unremarkable and mostly focused on pitching a wide array of amazing future opportunities for Intel Foundry. However, there were a number of particularly interesting reveals that we discerned, notably:

#1 LBT introduced a company called PDF Solutions and highlighted the important role their technology will play in helping Intel ramp its process technologies to higher yields.

#2 While Intel’s two publicly named external foundry customers (UMC, MediaTek) were featured at the event, their #1 customer by far, Michelle Johnston Holthaus (MJ), CEO of Intel Products was notable by her absence. I wonder why?

#3 Intel 4/3, currently ramping to high volume production in Ireland’s Fab 34, has issues

#4 Intel 18A, according to Mr. Chandrasekaran has had “ups and downs”. This was news to me. Prior to this, we only ever heard about “ups”, not “downs”. In general, I got the impression that Mr. Chandrasekaran was trying to lower our expectations of 18A and put the emphasis more on 14A

#5 Mr. Chandrasekaran quietly dropped what for me was a bombshell, namely that the company is walking away from their “Copy Exactly” principle of how to transfer a process technology from development fab to high volume manufacturing. If you blinked during his presentation, you missed this. It was almost like a throwaway remark, but in my opinion it has huge implications for the company’s future success. Why on earth would they abandon a methodology that has be at the core of their success for more than three decades?

Let’s dig in…