Chiplet ecosystems enable multi-vendor designs

By Don Dingee

February 20, 2024

Chiplets dominate semiconductor industry conversations right now – and after the recent Chiplet Summit, we expect the intensity to go up a couple of notches. One company name often heard is Blue Cheetah, and we had the opportunity to sit down with them recently to discuss their views and their just-announced design win at Tenstorrent. Their ideas on getting from chiplet specifications to chiplet ecosystems recall familiar industry dynamics with engineering and marketing working together in adoption cycles.

Two frequently-mentioned chiplet interconnect specs

Instead of a massive, complex, single-die SoC, chiplets are smaller pieces designed, fabbed, and tested independently, maybe in different process nodes, then packaged together in a bigger solution. In theory, chiplets would be reusable and interoperable. Designers could grab a chiplet without concern for what fabrication process made it or gory details we’ll see shortly, as long as the chiplet complies with a broadly adopted die-to-die (D2D) interconnect specification. Two specification candidates have bubbled to the top of the heap: BoW and UCIe.

Significant differences exist between these two specifications regarding their design philosophies, primarily driven by the types of chiplet use cases they aim to support. BoW focuses on optimizing disaggregated SoC designs with the most efficient die-to-die interconnect across a broad range of end product applications; achieving all of this requires a significant degree of flexibility in the specification. UCIe, on the other hand, focuses on plug-and-play interconnectivity and primarily aims to streamline interoperability between chiplets from any supplier.

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