Chiplets: 2023 (EBook)

$95.00

Chiplets are a disruptive technology. They change the way chips are designed, manufactured, tested, packaged, as well as the underlying business relationships and fundamentals. But they also open the door to vast new opportunities for existing chipmakers and startups to create highly customized components and systems for specific use cases and market segments.

This LEGO-like approach sounds straightforward enough on paper — decompose a chip into its component parts and connect them all together using some kind of high-speed interconnect, regardless of what process technology they were developed in. That’s the idea, at least. But it’s proving to be much harder than that. The number of tradeoffs and possible unintended interactions are significant, and the headaches only grow more severe as chipmakers consider a wide range of options.

While the largest chipmakers have proven that chiplets work, they’ve done so using internally sourced technologies. The challenges look very different for other chipmakers, which will be using off-the-shelf commercially developed chiplets. Inconsistent characterization, concerns over known good dies, partitioning, prioritization, signal integrity, and uneven aging are just some of the problems chipmakers will encounter with chiplets. Nevertheless, they have little choice but to solve them and push forward if they are to remain competitive on the number and breadth of features they offer, at a price point that is acceptable.

This ebook examines what chiplets are, what they are being used for today, and what they will be used for in the future. It also takes a close look at the hurdles they face, the technologies involved, and how standards and ecosystems are forming in these early days of the technology.

In This Report

Why chiplets

What is a chiplet

How chiplets are packaged
SIPs, MCMs
2D, 2.5D, 3D-IC

Connecting chiplets

Design issues
Teams sizes
Physical issues
Inter-die connectivity
IP and IP reuse
Security

Assembly and test

Standards

Commercialization of chiplets

Startup funding