SAN FRANCISCO, March 26 (Reuters) - Pat Gelsinger, the

former CEO of Intel ( INTC ), on Wednesday joined venture

capital firm Playground Global as a general partner and also

joined the board of a startup working to improve a key chip

manufacturing tool.

Founded in 2015, Silicon Valley-based Playground has $1.2

billion in assets under management and specializes in deep

technology investments such as semiconductors. It backed AI firm

MosaicML, which was sold to Databricks in a mostly stock deal

for $1.3 billion last year, as well as quantum computing firm

PsiQuantum, which Reuters reported is raising at least $750

million as it races to build quantum computers in Australia and

the U.S.

Gelsinger, who left Intel ( INTC ) after disagreements with its board

over his turnaround strategy, told Reuters in an interview that

he will be involved with 10 to 20 of Playground's portfolio

companies and focused on finding technologies that can perform

at least 10 times better than the existing state of the art.

"There are no sustainable protections. You must stay on the

front foot of innovation. And Playground gives me the chance to

do that and do it at a broader scale," Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger's first move is to join the board of a Playground

portfolio company called xLight as executive chairman. xLight is

developing a new kind of laser to produce extreme ultra-violet

light that uses far less electricity than the current lasers in

lithography machines produced by ASML Holding that are

the gold standard in chip manufacturing.

Gelsinger said the technology holds the promise of both

boosting the number of chips that factories can make and making

those chips smaller and faster - a decades-old trend known as

Moore's Law for Intel ( INTC ) co-founder Gordon Moore.

"We'll be able to keep advancing the capacity of Moore's Law

into the future," Gelsinger said. "And being able to have that

light source being done in America - I think that is huge for

us."