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Comment by michaeljx | Hacker News Reader

interesting perspective. Care to elaborate a bit more? Where you in the design department? Why did they put up chinese walls? Was it to enable the foundry to have other customers other than Intel designs? Why did you have similar type of equipment? Were you also manufacturing chipsets? If so, why didn't they expand your division to become a foundry?

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There's a good video from Asianometry (Lessons from Intel's First Foundry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y9LWYmVQu0

If you're an Intel foundry customer, you don't want your design or IP leaking across to Intel's product team, who might be a competitor.

But the IP is already "compiled", or if you want to isolate even further, separate just the mask making process. What could be learned from masks?

> What could be learned from masks

That's like asking what could you learn from building plans ...

I was in a fab module. The firewall part makes sense to not cross pollinate IP internally vs. externally, but it was taken to the extreme and management moved zero internal employees over to external so it was Intel’s tools and recipes but not the talent who knows all the tribal stuff.

> but not the talent who knows all the tribal stuff

Tribal knowledge doesn't appear on management org charts or in human resource titles.

Sounds like they were following some advice from “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by separating the business groups.

This wasn't something with the potential to become a disruptive innovation, as described in that book. Foundries are an established business model.

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