Intel embraces SDN to modernize its chip factories

As more semiconductor manufacturing springs up in the US, the use of SDN also “becomes one of the key steps in digital transformation where, in this case, a semiconductor manufacturer can collect, manage, and use data holistically from the factory floor to beyond the network edge,” says Hughes, whose most recent survey, IDC’s 2023 Future of Connectedness Sentiment, shows that 41% of manufacturers believe that the flexibility to add/change bandwidth capacity in near real-time is a top reason for SDN/SD-WAN investment.

The survey also showed that 31% of manufacturers say optimized WAN traffic for latency, jitter, and packet loss is another top reason for SDN/SD-WAN investment and is considered very important for managing factory floor equipment in real-time.

Intel has deployed SDN in roughly 15% of its factories to date and will continue to migrate existing Ethernet-based factories to SDN. For new implementations, Intel has chosen to use open source Ansible playbooks and scripts from GitHub to accelerate its move to SDN.

Intel certified Cisco’s ACI solution in time to deploy in high-volume factories built in Ireland and the US in 2022 and for more planned in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, Israel, Malaysia, Italy, and Germany in the coming years, according to the company.

Intel’s core partner on the SDN project is confident the benefits will continue to have a sizable benefit — even for a company of Intel’s size.

“The biggest benefit is that SDN helped Intel complete new factory network builds with 85% less headcount and weeks faster through the use of automated scripts,” says Carlos Rojas, a sales and business developer who worked on the project. “Automation and SDN enable better scalability and consistency of security and policy controls, and the ability to deploy micro-segmentation, improving Intel’s security posture and reducing attack surfaces.”