Chiplets and the early adopter’s dilemma

A novel PHY may be the answer to the packaging question

By Designing Electronics North America

Early adopters in the chiplet arena face a dilemma. In pursuit of the highest possible performance and density, the most widely discussed chiplet designs depend upon silicon interposers (or their close relatives, embedded silicon bridges) as a substrate for mounting and interconnecting the multiple dice.

Fabricating the inter-die connections on a silicon substrate allows much tighter bump spacing and line spacing, meaning more possible connections per millimeter of die edge, and hence greater inter-die bandwidth per millimeter of die edge. Also, for a given interconnect electronics, silicon offers a higher data rate than conventional organic substrates. For datacenter CPUs and GPUs, where density and performance are non-negotiable and price is secondary, the common belief has been, as one vendor recently said, “without interposers there can be no chiplets.”

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