The Chiplet Revolution

By Gregory Mone, Communications of the ACM

October 1, 2024

Reducing demands on a single chip by using smaller chips dedicated to specific functions.

When Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at semiconductor manufacturer Marvell, needed to familiarize some new engineering hires with one of the challenges facing their industry, he borrowed a bunch of LEGO blocks from his kids. He presented the group with a select number of mismatched blocks. The pieces, Kuemerle explained to his new initiates, were meant to represent different chips with particular functions.

Traditionally, all the critical components of a semiconductor have been packaged onto a single piece of silicon, an approach called homogeneous integration. The exercise Kuemerle proposed reflected a design strategy called heterogeneous integration, which pulls together different chips, known as chiplets, with their own specific functions. These chiplets can vary not only in terms of what they are designed to do, but also in their size and specifications. A memory chip might be relatively small, for example, and one designed for machine learning tasks much larger.

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