Can Chiplets Solve Semiconductor Challenges?

By William G. Wong (ElectronicDesign), Syed Alam (Accenture)

With the right investments, chiplets can help solve long-standing industry challenges such as increasing costs and supply disruptions, resulting in a world where devices are more intelligent than ever.

For the past couple of decades, most semiconductor advances, capabilities, and innovations have happened on the front end. This technological progress has been accompanied by increasingly more complex designs and smaller geometries, currently culminating at the 3-nm process node. Lately, though, achieving Moore’s Law has become more challenging and costly, to the point where building a 5-nm chip is now more costly than building 10- and 7-nm chips combined.

As the benefits of scaling continue to decrease with each new node, chipmakers are turning back to a concept nearly a decade old: Rather than manufacture a chip on a single piece of silicon, they’re combining individual functional die, also known as “chiplets,” which might be the next frontier in achieving Moore’s Law and advanced manufacturing at scale.

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