Chiplet: Are You Ready For Next Semiconductor Revolution?

During the 2010-decade, the benefits of Moore’s law began to fall apart. Moore’s law stated transistor density doubled every two years, the cost of compute would shrink by a corresponding 50%. The change in Moore’s law is due to increased in design complexity the evolution of transistor structure from planar devices, to Finfets. Finfets need multiple patterning for lithography to achieve devices dimensions to below 20-nm nodes.

At the beginning of this decade, computing needs have exploded, mostly due to proliferation of datacenters and due to the amount of data being generated and processed. In fact, adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and techniques like Machine Learning (ML) are now used to process ever-increasing data and has led to servers significantly increasing their compute capacity.

Servers have added many more CPU cores, have integrated larger GPUs used exclusively for ML, no longer used for graphics, and have embedded custom ASIC AI accelerators or complementary, FPGA based AI processing. Early AI chip designs were implemented using larger monolithic SoCs, some of them reaching the size limit imposed by the reticle, about 700mm2.

At this point, disaggregation into a smaller SoC plus various compute and IO chiplets appears to be the right solution. Several chip makers, like Intel, AMD or Xilinx have select this option for products going into production. In the excellent white paper from The Linley Group, “Chiplets Gain Rapid Adoption: Why Big Chips Are Getting Small”, it was shown that this option leads to better costs compared to monolithic SoCs, due to the yield impact of larger.

The major impact of this trend on IP vendors is mostly on the interconnect functions used to link SoCs and chiplets. At this point (Q3 2021), there are several protocols being used, with the industry trying to build formalized standards for many of them.

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