Intel's 18A etching process looks increasingly promising just a few months away from mass production.
From June 8 to 12, 2025, the Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits was held in Kyoto, Japan. An international conference focused entirely on semiconductor production technologies, as Wccftech reminds us, the VLSI Symposium was too good an opportunity for Intel to miss, when only a few days ago, it was TSMC that was the talk of the town. The Taiwanese foundry was in the news when the yield of its N2 production lines was reported to have reached an impressive 60%. This augurs well for the production of the first N2 (2 nm) chips before the end of the year, for AMD, Apple and NVIDIA.
© Wccftech
But let's get back to Intel, which was keen to reassure its investors by responding to these rumours of rising returns for TSMC. At Intel, the future of etching lies not in 2 nm, but in 1.8 nm with the Intel 18A process. The American company therefore intended to take advantage of the VLSI Symposium to take stock of the situation and assert, for example, that at equal voltages, Intel 18A is capable of delivering 15% higher performance than its current best technology, Intel 3.
© Wccftech
Thanks to its finer engraving, the Intel 18A should also offer an increase in maximum possible frequency: we're talking about an order of magnitude of +25% in favor of the Intel 18A vs. the Intel 3. Last but not least, the U.S.-based company also spoke of the energy savings made possible by this new etching process: maintaining a voltage of 0.75 volts, Intel claims a 40% reduction in power consumption for the Intel 18A vs. the Intel 3. Logically, these figures all point in the right direction and point to a brighter future for Intel, but we should bear in mind that Intel 18A production will only start at the end of this year, and will really take off at the beginning of next year.
