Chiplets are the latest buzz, but many challenges lie ahead

By Nitin Dahad, embedded.com ( March 10, 2024)

With lots of hype on chiplets, we look at the state of play through interviews with several players in the ecosystem: Synopsys, Anysys, Intel, Samsung, and Bosch, to understand the opportunities, the status and the challenges ahead.

Like most technologies in the electronics industry, there’s always the initial hype phase of the Gartner hype cycle, and chiplets are in that phase right now. The theory goes that chiplets herald a new era in which we’ll continue to be able to maintain Moore’s Law, using heterogenous architectures rather than a single monolithic IC to deliver the compute performance needed for modern compute needs without the cost of having to put everything in the most advanced process technologies.

There’s plenty of momentum right now with news stories like Tenstorrent licensing three chiplet designs to Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC); to the MIT Technology Review listing chiplets as one of the ten breakthrough technologies of 2024, and its follow on report about the Chinese city of Wuxi’s ambition to become the Silicon Valley of chiplets due to its position as a key center for packaging. Then there was the second Chiplet Summit held in Santa Clara, CA, in February 2024 which covered topics ranging from advanced packaging methods, high-speed die-to-die interfaces, generative AI applications, to the open chiplet economy.

I highlighted at the beginning of 2024 that chiplets would be one of the three trends to look out for in 2024, and then there was Arm’s recent announcement of its chiplet system architecture initiative plus AMBA specification update – potentially being one of the catalysts encouraging rapid development of a chiplet economy that some observers are suggesting.

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