Chiplets – The next generation chip design trend beyond Moore’s Law

By Tom Hackenberg, Yole Group

The next stage of integrated circuit manufacturing is disaggregation or breaking up the design of large chips into smaller units. These smaller units typically represent a unique function. The advantages are shorter design time, lower cost, easier drop-in inclusion of already available designs, increased modularity and scalability, and fewer manufacturing defects. This technique is especially well suited for leveraging the heterogeneous nature of large processors, coprocessors, system on chip (SoC) and integrated memory solutions, but the evolution of this trend is likely to spread throughout IC design.

This presentation is designed to provide a brief introduction to the nature of chiplet design and why it is so important at this time. The technical details will be presented in moderation including teardown examples of current chiplet solutions and which end-systems include them. The presentation will touch on technology advances that need to evolve to facilitate this approach. We will provide a market penetration and a five-year forecast for chiplet-based design strategies. We will provide longer views of the evolution to include such ICs as graphics, AI, and other accelerators, FGPAs, microcontrollers and other processors. We will conclude with why we think this trend is essential to the future of the semiconductor industry and design automation.