https://www.embedded.com/chiplets-are-the-latest-buzz-but-many-challenges-lie-ahead/

With lots of hype on chiplets, we look at the state of play through interviews with several players in the ecosystem: Synopsys, Ansys, Intel, Samsung, and Bosch, to understand the opportunities, the status and the challenges ahead.

Like most technologies in the electronics industry, there’s always the initial hype phase of the Gartner hype cycle, and chiplets are in that phase right now. The theory goes that chiplets herald a new era in which we’ll continue to be able to maintain Moore’s Law, using heterogenous architectures rather than a single monolithic IC to deliver the compute performance needed for modern compute needs without the cost of having to put everything in the most advanced process technologies.

There’s plenty of momentum right now with news stories like Tenstorrent licensing three chiplet designs to Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC); to the MIT Technology Review listing chiplets as one of the ten breakthrough technologies of 2024, and its follow on report about the Chinese city of Wuxi’s ambition to become the Silicon Valley of chiplets due to its position as a key center for packaging. Then there was the second Chiplet Summit held in Santa Clara, CA, in February 2024 which covered topics ranging from advanced packaging methods, high-speed die-to-die interfaces, generative AI applications, to the open chiplet economy.

I highlighted at the beginning of 2024 that chiplets would be one of the three trends to look out for in 2024, and then there was Arm’s recent announcement of its chiplet system architecture initiative plus AMBA specification update – potentially being one of the catalysts encouraging rapid development of a chiplet economy that some observers are suggesting.

Chiplets – where are we now?

While there’s all this excitement, where are we now and what are the challenges? In recent months, I interviewed several players in the ecosystem – Synopsys, Ansys, Intel, Samsung, and Bosch, to understand the opportunities, the status and the challenges ahead. In this article, I present those interviews which you can listen to in full to make your own judgement based on their thoughts.

The key messages I was hearing through these interviews are that:

• There’s a strong pull in the industry to move towards heterogenous architectures. While the principle has already been around for decades, in terms of putting multiple chips on a PCB or systems on module, multi-die systems and chiplets offer a way of delivering more performance and bandwidth.
• While technology challenges maybe overcome, the biggest challenge is how you would make multiple dies from multiple foundries work together. How would you pre-validate those chips, how will you ensure they will be to a specified standard, and then who will integrate all the components and the software?
• How will you enable traceability and security in the multi-die or chiplet supply chain?
• While lots of resources are currently being thrown at chiplet development, the cost of development needs to be justified.
• There is appetite for a ‘chiplet store’ type ecosystem, but that relies on industry collaboration and standardization – and that could be years away yet, unless there’s some catalyst for it.

For this article, I spoke to the following executives.

(full article at link)