Intel Foundry says that it has completed RAMP-C, the United States government program awarded to the company in 2021 to stand up a secure, domestic leading-edge chip ecosystem on its 18A process. The program funneled money to commercial and defense partners to run test chips on a design kit that wasn't finished yet, and its conclusion marks readiness for external customers who will pay full price to fabricate real products, including those who might use the Intel Secure Enclave manufacturing flow that RAMP-C helped to shape.
The announcement doesn't name any customers that Intel may have secured as a result of RAMP-C, although the program roster has been public for years and includes Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. That may be down to the sensitive nature of any actual defense industrial base (DIB) products that are likely to be produced with the Secure Enclave defense-focused manufacturing flow for those products, which spans project stages from design to chip fabrication to advanced packaging.
