Cadence Rolls Out System Chiplet to Reorganize the SoC

By James Morra, ElectronicDesign (December 18, 2024)

Learn more about the motivations behind Cadence’s new Arm-based system chiplet in the latest installment of The Briefing.

The semiconductor industry is moving out of the monolithic age of the system-on-chip (SoC).

Instead of arranging every building block of IP on the same slab of silicon, the movers and shakers in the chip market are breaking them down and bundling them into separate smaller chiplets. Each of these smaller chiplets can be made using the most optimal process technology for the job in the system. Integrating all of the chips together with 2.5D packaging or 3D integration makes it possible to mimic a single large chip.

In principle, companies could take care of the chiplets at the heart of the processor—for instance, chiplets for general-purpose computing based on CPU cores, or those housing high-performance accelerators such as GPUs. Then they could choose off-the-shelf chiplets for the memory, connectivity, or other features. In practice, most companies construct the chiplets by themselves due to the cost and complexity of adopting third-party chiplets and the limited standards surrounding them.

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