Shifting to 7 Nanometer Processors: Meteor Lake and Beyond

When Intel initially designed its 7 nm processes, the company determined that the extreme ultraviolet-lithography (EUV) manufacturing technique was nascent. Because of that, Intel decided to the use of EUV. Consequently, that decision added more complexity to its manufacturing process, Gelsinger said. Intel has now “fully embraced” EUV, paving its way toward 7 nm processes.

“We’ve re architected and simplified our 7 nm process flow, increasing our use of EUV by more than 100%,” Gelsinger said. “We have a very strong partnership with ASML [which provides the EUV machinery to mass-produce integrated circuits], and our plans to now stay on the leading edge EUV usage are well underway.”

The current plan is to tape in Intel’s 7 nm compute tile for Meteor Lake in the second quarter of this year.

“Meteor Lake features a breakthrough new x86 architecture and modular design, utilizing multiple manufacturing processes across our XPU IPs,” he said.