Reducing the barrier to ASICs with chiplets

To unlock the true power of chiplets, several hard problems need to be solved

By Designing Electronics North America

For the last 50 years, the semiconductor industry has been all about monolithic integration, doubling the number of transistors on a single chip every two years. The results have been nothing short of miraculous, with electronics getting both cheaper and better year over year.

However, as we approach the physical (atomic) limits of device scaling, we now need to find new ways of improving the energy and cost efficiency of electronics. While physical scaling may be saturating, fortunately there remains plenty of room at the bottom in terms of cost, energy, and time. Hyper- specialized circuits have demonstrated 100 to 1000x Size-Weight-Area-Power-Cost (SWAP-C) advantages over general purpose processors. Similarly, specialized devices and materials can offer 10 to 100x SWAP-C advantages over CMOS logic processes.

These two promising pathways are currently blocked by two fundamental economic challenges:

1. Designing complex specialized circuits in the form of application- specific integrated circuits (ASICs) can cost over $100M and take years to complete.
2. Integrating new specialized materials and devices into advanced CMOS processes is economically impractical.

An elegant solution to both of these challenges is the introduction of “chiplets,” which are tiny integrated circuits (ICs) with partial functionality designed to be combined with other chiplets within a single package to create a complete chip, which is also known as a multi-die system.

If implemented correctly, chiplet technology promises to enable custom silicon development with the design cost of PCBs and the SWAP-C of ASICs.Unfortunately, the benefits of chiplet technology have to date been accessible to only a small number of giant semiconductor vendors who leverage chiplets to improve production yields and to reduce NRE costs for multi-SKU product families.

To unlock the true power of chiplets, several hard problems need to be solved as follows

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