What Exactly Are Chiplets And Heterogeneous Integration?

New technologies drive new terminology, but the early days for those new approaches can be very confusing.

By Bryon Moyer, SemiEngineering | March 20, 2025 

The terms “chiplet” and “heterogeneous integration” fill news pages, conference papers, and marketing presentations, and for the most part engineers understand what they’re reading. But speakers sometimes stumble during a presentation trying to figure out whether a particular die qualifies as a chiplet, and heterogeneous integration comes in different guises for different people. Both terms lack well-accepted definitions that can help navigate the nuances that now bedevil the terms.

For some industry experts, the presence of a die-to-die interface qualifies a piece of silicon as a chiplet. There is much more disagreement when it comes to heterogeneous integration, and when pushing and pulling on different criteria during a discussion, one person’s definition may shift. Today, this discussion could feel pedantic, but in the long term, clear and consistent definitions could spur growth in this nascent architecture.

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