This Chinese city wants to be the Silicon Valley of chiplets

By Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review (February 7, 2024)

Wuxi, the Chinese center of chip packaging, is investing in chiplet research to enhance its role in the semiconductor industry.

Outside China, chiplets are one of the alternative routes that the semiconductor industry could take to improve chip performance cost-effectively. Instead of endlessly trying to cram more transistors into one chip, the chiplet approach proposes that the functions of a chip can be separated into several smaller devices, and each component could be easier to make than a powerful single-piece chip. Companies like Apple and Intel have already made commercial products this way. 

But within China, the technology takes on a different level of significance. US sanctions mean that Chinese companies can’t purchase the most advanced chips or the equipment to make them, so they have to figure out how to maximize the technologies they have. And chiplets come in handy here: if the companies can make each chiplet to the most advanced level they are capable of and assemble these chiplets into a system, it can act as a substitute for more powerful cutting-edge chips.

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