Chiplet Tradeoffs And Limitations

Multi-die assemblies offer more flexibility, but figuring out the right amount of customization can have a big impact on power, performance, and cost

By  Ann Mutschler, SemiEngineering  | April 10th, 2025

The semiconductor industry is buzzing with the benefits of chiplets, including faster time to market, better performance, and lower power, but finding the correct balance between customization and standardization is proving to be more difficult than initially thought.

For a commercial chiplet marketplace to really take off, it requires a much deeper understanding of how chiplets behave individually and together. There needs to be a consistent way to connect chiplets to each other and to various other components, to characterize them so they can be re-used across multiple designs, and to package and test them. On top of all of that, there needs to be a way to accomplish all of this more easily at the very outset of the design process. And while this has some similarities to the soft IP market, the shift to what is essentially a collection of hardened IP requires more structural and thermal analysis, more physics, and a deeper understanding of how everything will be packaged and ultimately used.

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