Empower the Next Wave of Semiconductor Reuse Through Chiplet Realization

By Mick Posner

February 10, 2026

Unlock the future of semiconductor innovation with chiplets — enabling scalable, cost-effective designs and paving the way for a reusable chip marketplace.

Chiplets are clearly on the minds of system-on-chip (SoC) and electronic systems designers. Case in point: Cadence’s eBook titled “Cadence Chiplet Solutions — Helping You Realize Your Chiplet Ambitions” was downloaded more than 500 times in its first month.

Chiplets enable a marketplace of reusable semiconductor die, allowing system designers to aggregate complex functions through package-level scaling. The resulting chips deliver immense functionality with unprecedented time-to-market, at a fraction of the typical cost for a monolithic chip design.

They’re predicted to enable massive semiconductor reuse, assuming a large-scale chiplet marketplace is realized. The question isn’t whether such a marketplace will materialize, but when it will materialize and what it will take for that to happen.

To understand the future of chiplets, it’s worth pausing and touching on the user profile for multi-die designs and chiplets. Multi-die design is an established semiconductor design technique spearheaded by the data center, cloud infrastructure, and AI/high-performance computing (HPC) markets.

In this model, users typically design all die in the system, managing everything from design and manufacture to packaging. They sometimes utilize proprietary die-to-die interfaces or customize them to specific needs, treating die reuse as a nice-to-have, rather than a must-have.

On the other hand, chiplet users are unlikely to design all dies in the system. Instead, they’re looking to outsource some or all of them, relying on standardization across die-to-die interfaces and packaging to ensure interoperability. These chiplet aggregators are likely planning multiple product SKUs from the same set of die and expecting future die reuse across numerous product generations.

Many applications utilize multi-die technology, with mature usage seen across data centers, cloud, and AI. The use of chiplet-based architectures across these applications continues to expand, primarily for I/O disaggregation, with several off-the-shelf chiplet solutions available for designers. As the importance and complexity of I/O and memory interface designs ramps up, designers seek ways to accelerate design schedules without the need to build deep in-house expertise.

To read the full article, click here