Intel 2008 Annual Report Download - page 13

Table of Contents
Our employment practices are consistent with, and we expect our suppliers and subcontractors to abide by, local country law.
In addition, we impose a minimum employee age requirement as well as progressive environmental, health, and safety (EHS)
requirements, regardless of local law.
We have thousands of suppliers, including subcontractors, providing our various materials and service needs. We set
expectations for supplier performance and reinforce those expectations with periodic assessments. We communicate those
expectations to our suppliers regularly and work with them to implement improvements when necessary. We seek, where
possible, to have several sources of supply for all of these materials and resources, but we may rely on a single or limited
number of suppliers, or upon suppliers in a single country. In those cases, we develop and implement plans and actions to
reduce the exposure that would result from a disruption in supply. We have entered into long-term contracts with certain
suppliers to ensure a portion of our silicon supply.
Our products typically are produced at multiple Intel facilities at various sites around the world, or by subcontractors who have
multiple facilities. However, some products are produced in only one Intel or subcontractor facility, and we seek to implement
actions and plans to reduce the exposure that would result from a disruption at any such facility. See “Risk Factors” in Part I,
Item 1A of this Form 10-K.
Research and Development
We are committed to investing in world-class technology development, particularly in the design and manufacture of
integrated circuits. Research and development (R&D) expenditures in 2008 were $5.7 billion ($5.8 billion in fiscal year 2007
and $5.9 billion in fiscal year 2006).
Our R&D activities are directed toward developing the technology innovations that we believe will deliver our next generation
of products and platforms, which will in turn enable new form factors and new usage models for businesses and consumers.
Our R&D activities range from design and development of products, to developing and refining manufacturing processes, to
researching future technologies and products.
We are focusing our R&D efforts on advanced computing, communications, and wireless technologies as well as energy
efficiency by developing new microarchitectures, advancing our silicon manufacturing process technology, delivering the next
generation of microprocessors and chipsets, improving our platform initiatives, and developing software solutions and tools to
support our technologies. Our R&D efforts enable new levels of performance and address areas such as scalability for multi-
core architectures, energy efficiency, system manageability and security, ease of use, and new communications capabilities. In
addition, we are making significant R&D investments in growth areas such as SoC, MIDs, embedded applications, consumer
electronics, and graphics.
As part of our R&D efforts, we plan to introduce a new microarchitecture for our mobile, desktop, and Intel Xeon processors
approximately every two years and ramp the next generation of silicon process technology in the intervening years. We refer
to this as our “tick-tock” technology development cadence. Our leadership in silicon technology has enabled us to make
“Moore’s Law” a reality. Moore’s Law predicted that transistor density on integrated circuits would double about every two
years. Our leadership in silicon technology has also helped to expand on the advances anticipated by Moore
’
s Law by bringing
new capabilities into silicon and producing new products and platforms optimized for a wider variety of applications. In 2008,
we introduced a new microarchitecture using our 45nm process technology. We are currently developing 32nm process
technology, our next-generation process technology, and expect to begin manufacturing products using that technology in the
second half of 2009.
Our R&D model is based on a global organization that emphasizes a collaborative approach to identifying and developing new
technologies, leading standards initiatives, and influencing regulatory policy to accelerate the adoption of new technologies.
Our R&D initiatives are performed by various business groups within the company, and we centrally manage key cross-
business group product initiatives to align and prioritize our R&D activities across these groups. In addition, we may augment
our R&D initiatives by investing in companies or entering into agreements with companies that have similar R&D focus areas.
For example, we have an agreement with Micron for joint development of NAND flash memory technologies.
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