Intel hires tenured Samsung exec to lead Foundry Services — signals company focus on winning business from potential Foundry suitors

Intel this week announced that Shawn 'Seung Hoon' Han will join the company as senior vice president and general manager of Foundry Services, where he will be responsible for working with external customers. Shawn Han will join the company from Samsung Foundry, where he had similar responsibilities, and will bring decades of valuable experience at a contract chipmaker, something that Intel Foundry needs these days.

"I am excited to welcome Shawn Han to our leadership team," wrote Naga Chandrasekaran, executive vice president and the head of Intel Foundry, in a LinkedIn post. "Shawn will be joining us in May as senior vice president and general manager of Foundry Services, reporting to me. Shawn brings valuable expertise in the semiconductor industry from his three decades at Samsung, including most recently overseeing sales at Samsung Foundry. He also offers impressive technical acumen from his work on multiple logic process nodes beginning in 1996."

As the head of Foundry Services — a structure within Intel Foundry responsible for working with customers in general and external customers specifically — Shawn Han will be responsible for sales and customer relations, which includes landing external customers. More recently, Shawn Han served as executive vice president of Samsung Foundry, which he joined from Samsung Semiconductor in 2021.

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Shawn Han will become the highest-ranking executive focused on foundry customer engagement that Intel has hired to date. While the company has traditionally hired leaders focused on product or process technology development, Han has spent the last five years specifically on customer-facing roles.

The hire indicates that Intel Foundry understands its next bottleneck is not just process technology, but customer acquisition, trust, and long-term relationships. While Intel Foundry may have a great value and technology proposition with 18A, 14A, EMIB, and Foveros, external foundry customers do not sign multi-year deals because the node deck looks good, but because they believe Intel Foundry can behave like a real contract chipmaker offering predictable PDKs, realistic timelines, predictable yields, sufficient capacity, and responsive support. Hiring someone who has already lived in a customer-centric foundry world is a good way to achieve that trust and relationships with customers. At the end of the day, Intel yet has to persuade its potential customers that Intel Foundry can offer the same discipline, neutrality, and customer obsession that pure-play foundries have in their blood.

The timing of the hire seems to be right, too. Intel has been trying to land customers with its 18A, 18A-P,14A nodes, and advanced packaging for a while now, and while the company continues to say that the interest towards its process technology is high, interest is not the same thing as booked wafer volume. Therefore, one of Han's main tasks will be converting technical curiosity into committed business.

For sure, Shawn Han's knowledge of potential customers' needs as well as his personal relationships with Samsung Foundry customers will be added bonuses to Intel's Foundry Services. Kevin O'Buckley, the previous head of Foundry Services, left for Qualcomm in late February.

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