The Changing ASICs Landscape: the Shift Toward Chip Disaggregation

By Padma Nagaraja

April 21, 2026

The rapid rise of AI is reshaping the demands placed on silicon. For ASICs, this means workloads are becoming more system-specific while architectures grow increasingly modular and disaggregated. These shifts place greater weight on cross-domain collaboration spanning architecture, packaging, and manufacturing.

For many years, ASICs were designed around relatively stable standards and well-defined functions: video codecs, networking protocols, signal processing pipelines, and so forth. Performance gains largely came from integrating more functionality onto a single monolithic die and relying on process scaling to do the rest.

That model is now under pressure. AI workloads are highly diverse, compute-intensive, and tightly coupled to software behavior and system context. A single “best” architecture no longer exists. Instead, performance, power, and cost are determined by how well silicon is tailored to a specific combination of algorithms, data flows, deployment constraints, and operating environments.

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