Arm: Chiplets Can’t Deliver on TCO Without an Ecosystem

By Sally Ward-Foxton, EETimes | June 27, 2025

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Addressing the crowd at EE Times’ The Future of Chiplets event at DAC, Arm’s Eddie Ramirez called on the industry to adopt robust standards and build a true chiplet marketplace, warning that current semi-custom approaches could limit the economic viability of disaggregated SoCs.

“We’ve come very far in the last five years,” Ramirez said, noting that most data center SoCs coming out today are chiplet-based, albeit, they are semi-custom designs where a single vendor designs all of the chiplets.

“That model is great, but it’s hard for that model to have a positive [total cost of ownership, TCO] return because what you’ve now done is increase the overall cost of the SoC design,” he said. “You’re paying for multiple chiplets. You’re qualifying multiple chiplets.”

Arm nevertheless sees progress in chiplet reuse, he said. Companies are emerging that specialise in IO chiplets to allow others to focus on compute or accelerator chiplets.

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