Manufacturing Capital
We are transforming from a traditional IDM to a modern IDM by investing to lead advances in silicon technology, leaning into our expertise and manufacturing scale, while evolving to engage with the ecosystem and leveraging our disaggregated design capabilities. Unlike many other semiconductor companies, we primarily design and manufacture our products in our own manufacturing facilities and we will continue to integrate engineering and manufacturing to provide new products with significant cost advantage. At the same time, our architectural shift to die disaggregation allows us to mix and match architectures, IP, process nodes, and silicon that creates increasing flexibility for our products.
In developing new generations of manufacturing process technology, we seek to realize the benefits from Moore's Law, a law of economics predicted by our co-founder Gordon Moore more than 50 years ago. Realizing Moore's Law can create economic benefits as we are able to either reduce a chip's cost as we shrink its size, or increase functionality and performance of a chip while maintaining the same cost with higher density. This makes possible the innovation of new products with higher performance while balancing power efficiency, cost, and size to meet customers' needs. Our ability to optimize and apply our manufacturing expertise to deliver more advanced, differentiated products has been foundational to our success and is a continued focus of our investments.
The IDM model has been foundational to Intel's success as a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing by enabling product optimization, improved economics, and supply assurance. We are committed to be the supplier of choice for achieving best-in-class performance and to deliver world-changing products on a predictable cadence for our customers.
—Keyvan Esfarjani, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Manufacturing and Operations
We shipped higher volumes of 10nm products in 2020 than we had anticipated at the beginning of the year. We also launched our 11th Gen Intel Core processors with new 10nm SuperFin Technology.
We announced in July 2020 that our 7nm-based CPU product timing would be delayed and that the primary driver was the yield of our 7nm manufacturing process. We will continue to invest in our future process technology roadmap and advanced packaging technologies to differentiate our products, provide manufacturing optionality and deliver a predictable cadence of leadership products to our customers.
Our goal is to enable leadership products for Intel by delivering predictable process and packaging technology innovation.
—Ann Kelleher, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Technology Development
Network and Supply Chain
Our global supply chain supports internal partners across architecture, product design, technology development, manufacturing and operations, sales and marketing, and business units, with the goal of enabling product and process leadership, industry-leading total cost of ownership, and uninterrupted supply for our customers. Our supply chain ecosystem comprises thousands of suppliers globally. Our worldwide site expansion projects remained on track despite disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to our own manufacturing capacity, we continue to use third-party foundries to expand the ways in which we can support our customers. These third- party solutions complement our manufacturing and provide additional flexibility. Our world-class safety standards and supply chain operations, including our robust risk management and crisis response model, have to date allowed our worldwide factory and supply chain network to continue to operate safely and with mostly on-time deliveries despite the pandemic.
As Intel pursues an expanded data-centric market, our collaboration with our wide-ranging supplier ecosystem is deeper, more vibrant, and farther reaching than ever. Together with the ecosystem, we are focused on enabling technology advancements to deliver uninterrupted supply of leadership products to our customers.
—Dr. Randhir Thakur, Corporate Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer
The majority of our logic wafer manufacturing is conducted in the U.S. We have 10 manufacturing sites—six are wafer fabrication, three are assembly/test facilities, and our Costa Rica site added in 2020 is a test-only site. The following map shows our present factory sites and the countries where we have a significant R&D and/or sales presence. In response to COVID-19, we quickly made operational changes and adopted measures to enable a continued safe environment for our employees and operation of our manufacturing sites.
Our manufacturing facilities are primarily used for silicon wafer manufacturing, assembling, and testing of our platform and memory products. We operate in a network of manufacturing facilities integrated as one factory to provide the most flexible supply capacity, allowing us to better analyze our production costs and adapt to changes in capacity needs. Our new process technologies are transferred identically from a central development fab to each manufacturing facility. After transfer, the network of factories and the development fab collaborate to continue driving operational improvements. This enables fast ramp of the operation, fast learning, and better quality control.
Our NAND memory fabrication facility in Dalian, China is included in the transaction entered into with SK hynix to divest our NAND memory business, and is part of the NAND assets held for sale as of December 26, 2020. Our Intel Optane memory business is expressly excluded from this transaction. The next generations of Intel Optane technology and SSDs are being developed in New Mexico following the sale of our non-controlling interest in IMFT to Micron Technology, Inc. (Micron) in 2019. We will continue to purchase product manufactured by Micron under our supply agreement, which includes the next generation of Intel® 3D XPointTM technology.