Enabling Innovative Multi-Vendor Chiplet-Based Designs

By Elad Alon,  Blue Cheetah Analog Design
Semiengineering.com (September 26th, 2024)

What makes chiplets so attractive, and why they are essential for future designs.

Chiplets have emerged as a critical implementation paradigm for semiconductor products, primarily because they can deliver cost benefits relative to a non-chiplet-based approach.

The first, most well-proven, and obvious benefit of a chiplet-based approach is manufacturing cost. Manufacturing cost benefits are accrued either from the appropriate selection of chiplet die size, or by optimizing the technology node of the individual chiplets to best line up with the specific functionality/features they realize.

Note that die size selection doesn’t necessarily mean each chiplet is “small.” In some cases the chiplets are full reticles, but they are being stitched together on package and resulting in a more cost-effective solution than alternative approaches with the same net silicon area. In the case of node optimization, more peripheral or I/O functionality (e.g.) may be best implemented in more mature nodes where the performance is more than sufficient, but the cost is substantially lower than the latest cutting-edge node.

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