When Lip-Bu Tan became the CEO of Intel last year, it was clear that a lot was going to change at the company. Now, details of these changes are beginning to emerge. We already know that Lip-Bu Tan personally assesses and approves chip designs before tape outs, but as it turns out, he also wants designs to be bug-free and ready for mass production already with the A0 revision, something that the company's products have failed to do.
"One thing about timetable, I have a culture right now I have just implemented. It has to be A0 to production," said Lip-Bu Tan at JP Morgan's Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. "A0 is when you tape out, first time pass. Intel does not have that culture, so I tell that, first time pass A0. B0, you keep your job. Anything above that, you are fired."
"So that culture people initially thought that I'm just joking, and now I started to implement, they started to say that, 'Okay, Lip-Bu, you are very serious, you really look into all the design, all the bugs that we've tried to fix, and then all the IP that we use. You make sure that we certify and make sure we do that before we go to tape-out,' and so those are kind of the culture we need to have," Tan said.
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