UCIe Goes Back To The Drawing Board

The integration of multiple dies within a single package increasingly is viewed as the next evolution for extending Moore’s Law, but it also presents myriad challenges — particularly in achieving a universally accepted standard integrating plug-and-play chiplets from different vendors.

“In some respects, people are already doing this,” says Debendra Das Sharma, Intel senior fellow and chair of the UCIe Consortium. “They’re putting multiple dies on the same package, and we’ve been doing it for decades back to what was multi-chip modules (MCMs). And if you look in our mainstream CPUs today, they’re all multiple chips on the same package.”

Combining more than one chip in a package becomes a lot more complicated, however, when those chips have different functions or come from different vendors or foundries. That’s where a standard like UCIe becomes necessary.

“For most of the multi-chip products that are in the market, the same company is designing and providing the multiple dies, so they know exactly how they talk to each other and how to divide or partition the chip,” says Vik Chaudhry, senior director of product marketing and business development at Amkor. “That makes it a little easier to understand how one part talks to the other. What UCIe is trying to do is standardize that interconnect between multiple vendors.”

While other protocols like Bunch of Wires (BoW) have made significant strides in recent years and are still being developed, UCIe stands out for its backing by many of the largest chip manufacturers and its support for all major packaging technologies, including organic substrates, silicon interposers, and RDL fan-outs.

Fig. 1: Chiplet diagram with UCIe interconnect highlighted. Source: Keysight

But the move toward UCIe compatibility necessitates more than a mere afterthought in the chip creation process. It requires a foundational shift back to the drawing board, where compatibility must be conceived as an integral component of the chip, not retrofitted as an expedient solution. As this standard evolves, it has become increasingly apparent that for chiplets to truly embrace UCIe, the blueprint for their design must be reimagined from the ground up.

“UCIe is a layout,” says Chaudry. “It’s designed. But keep in mind, these chiplets can be from different fab nodes. One could be 5nm, another could be 3nm, and third could be 14nm. Somehow you have to connect these dies together. You need to be compatible in terms of how much space you have to run the routes, and that’s what UCIe is addressing.”

The transition to UCIe is not merely about different vendors adapting to a new standard. It requires a willingness among manufacturers throughout the industry to align their design and production processes with a common protocol that is still, in many respects, a work in progress.

While it is commonly assumed that chiplets plus advanced packaging represent the next evolution for extending Moore’s Law, the lack of a fully defined standard, coupled with the uncertainty surrounding the integration with existing technologies, means investing in new designs for UCIe is currently limited to the largest players in the market.

“Anytime you put multiple dies on a substrate or interposer, it’s challenging,” adds Chaudhry. “As we are seeing AI come into the picture, we are seeing a lot of vendors putting multiple dies on a chip, and not just 3 or 4, but 8, 10, or 12 dies. The complexity exponentially grows as you have more and more dies on the same interposer or substrate. You also have to test everything in between, and that increases the complexity and cost. That’s a huge challenge for anybody, and right now only a few companies in the world are capable of committing those kinds of resources and those kinds of expenses to put a line together.”

Moreover, the adoption of UCIe still must overcome significant hurdles in terms of scalability, compatibility with existing systems, and ensuring that the cost implications do not outweigh the benefits.

The chiplet evolution
Large chipmakers have been constrained by the size of the reticle field for at least the last several process nodes, which sharply limited the number of features that could be crammed onto a planar SoC. Today, with node shrinks becoming more costly and challenging, the best solution available is to decompose the SoC into individual blocks, or chiplets.

“Once the dies become really big, you’re up against the reticle limit,” says Intel’s Das Sharma. “That’s where you will see a lot of people deploying chiplets. You’re basically having multiple sets of chips being packaged together to deliver a certain set of functionality.”

Take, for instance, the leap to 50 Tb per second switches that are challenging the limits of reticle size. There’s a growing need to dissect and distribute the functionality of these chips across multiple components. Whether it’s the I/O, memory, or SRAM, the key lies in strategically breaking down the SoC into smaller units. This not only makes the manufacturing process more feasible, but also opens doors to more innovative and efficient design architectures.

It also provides some immediate benefits. Smaller dies yield better than larger ones, which is why in 2012 Xilinx split its 28nm FPGA into four different dies, connected through an interposer. It also provides room to grow, because the individual chiplets are still well below the reticle limit.

But all of the early implementations were homogeneous. They were all developed by the same vendor using the same process technology. A big benefit of advanced packaging is the ability to combine heterogeneous chiplets in the same package, allowing analog circuits and less-critical features to be developed at whatever process node makes sense. This is the challenge facing large chipmakers, foundries, and OSATs today, and it’s one that has not yet been fully solved.

Nevertheless, the chip industry agrees on one thing. There needs to be a common way to connect all of these chiplets together, and this is where UCIe fits into the picture.

The UCIe standard
Achieving a consensus on the electrical characteristics that underpin the UCIe is akin to orchestrating a symphony with a multitude of instruments, each with its own acoustic signature. Ensuring that chiplets from different corners of the industry can connect and communicate efficiently necessitates bridging gaps in voltage levels, signal timing, and power distribution.

In March 2022, the UCIe consortium released UCIe 1.0 that included specifications for a standardized physical die-to-die interface designed to facilitate seamless communication between chiplets, regardless of where they were manufactured or by whom. The specifications encompassed key aspects, such as electrical properties, physical dimensions, and protocols necessary for ensuring compatibility and efficient data transfer between diverse chip components.

“On advanced packages at 45 microns, the numbers are pretty stellar,” says Das Sharma. “You have 188 gigabytes per second per square millimeter as a starting point, up to 1.35 terabytes per second per square millimeter. People will have a hard time even absorbing that kind of bandwidth and processing it.”

UCIe 1.0 uses a layered protocol approach. The physical layer underpins the protocol stack, dedicated to defining and managing electrical signaling, such as clock synchronization and link training, while also incorporating sideband communication channels essential for non-data interactions between chiplets.

At the heart of UCIe’s mechanics is the Die-to-Die (D2D) adapter. This crucial interface acts as the gatekeeper, managing link state and facilitating negotiation parameters for chiplets, crucial for establishing reliable chiplet communication. It optionally extends a safeguard for data integrity through mechanisms like cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and link-level retry capabilities. This not only ensures accuracy in high-speed data transfer, but also aligns different chiplet protocols by providing an arbitration system enabling multiple chips to interact efficiently.

“UCIe is pretty flexible in that way,” says Chaudhry. “It supports your PCIe protocols, XML protocol, or streaming, so you can decide which protocol you want to support. And it has different data rates that it supports. It’s the lowest common denominator that everybody will support. If you’re on a 3nm process, you can support a much higher data rate, but if the other chiplet is at a different process node, then both the parts will support the basic lowest common denominator of the spec, and then you can talk on that.”

UCIe also incorporates strategies to mitigate interconnect defects, such as stuck-at faults and signal discontinuities. Stipulations within UCIe include the implementation of auxiliary pathways, furnishing a means to maintain connectivity if the primary lanes fail. This redundancy helps sustain system functionality by providing avenues for fault tolerance and repair.

UCIe also embraces existing standards such as PCI Express (PCIe) and Compute Express Link (CXL) natively, ensuring a broad resonance across the industry by capitalizing on these well-established protocols. The layered approach of UCIe also encompasses comprehensive usage models.

In August 2023, the consortium published UCIe version 1.1, extending reliability mechanisms to more protocols and supporting additional usage models. These enhancements are not merely incremental. They are geared towards pivotal segments such as automotive, which is gravitating toward chiplets.

One key area where the evolution from UCIe 1.0 to 1.1 becomes evident is in the standard’s preventive monitoring features. UCIe 1.1 expands the protocol with new registers designed to capture detailed Eye Margin information — viewing both width and height — which provides standardized reporting formats and proactive link health monitoring. Rather than reinventing the wheel, UCIe 1.1 leverages the existing periodic parity Flit injection mechanism from version 1.0, enhancing error detection and reporting capabilities through a new error log register. That, in turn, allows for improved assessment of link repair necessities. UCIe 1.1 also offers enhancements for compliance testing.

Another notable aspect is the advent of new and emerging usages, particularly with streaming protocols. Whereas UCIe 1.0’s support for such protocols was restricted to Raw Mode, UCIe 1.1 extends the utility of the die-to-die (D2D) adapter on the FDI interface to streaming protocols. This extension enables a blend of CRC retry power management features and facilitates the coexistence of multiple protocols.

UCIe 1.1 also considers cost optimization for advanced packaging solutions in anticipation of shrinking bump pitches and the advent of 3D integration. The introduction of additional column arrangements in UCIe 1.1 creates broader opportunities for mix-and-match dies.

“In a chiplet environment, the dies are very close to each other and your shoreline is very limited,” says Chaudhry. “You have limited space to connect the dies, and how the number of pins are connected, facing each other, that becomes critical. That is one thing that UCIe is addressing. What should be the pin location? Whether it’s 6-, 8-, or 16-column, how do you arrange it so that when one vendor has an 8-column configuration, they can talk to one with a 12-column configuration and connect to it physically, not just in terms of pins, but also connectivity and shoreline compatibility?”

Designing for interoperability
There are a number of technical hurdles that still stand in the way of the widespread adoption of UCIe. These include a need for precise electrical conformity, predictable signaling realms, and systematic physical interconnects catering to a variety of nodes and manufacturing processes.

“You can also have HBM in there, which can be very tall compared to a single ASIC,” says Amkor’s Chaudhry. “How do you address those height differences? A lot of different issues come into play when you’re putting different dies and different chiplets together.”

Thermal management is also a key element for high-density packaging. Disparate process nodes inevitably present distinct power profiles and heat dissipation characteristics. Bridging these gaps necessitates innovative heat distribution methodologies and sophisticated warpage control to ensure structural integrity and reliable function in complex modules.

“There are a lot of challenges in thermal,” adds Chaudhry. “When you have two dies from different process nodes, how do you make sure that you have a way to dissipate the power equally? Those are some of the challenges as we go along and there’s no general solution to that yet. Those are kind of things that the consortium is looking at right now.”

Continued evolution
Another goal of the UCIe consortium is to ensure that anyone developing a chiplet today will still be able to use that design five years from now, despite progress in the standard during that time.

“It will absolutely evolve,” adds Chaudhry. “PCI did the same thing. They are on Gen 5 or Gen 6 now. USB is the same way with USB 4.0 coming soon. CXL is at 3.1. We expect the same thing to happen to UCIe. It will continuously improve and come up with new and more flexible solutions that our members can adopt.”

“The more people get involved, the more they’re going to start tweaking things,” adds Das Sharma. “Some of them are not going to work out, and some of them are going to work out really well. This is a multi-decade journey, and the key is to learn and adapt and keep moving on.”

Conclusion
The UCIe initiative aims to revolutionize chip package interconnectivity by emulating the success of Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) at the PCB level. By facilitating direct inter-die connections within the chip package, UCIe endeavors to drastically cut power usage, enhance bandwidth efficiency, and, ultimately, reduce production costs.

“The good thing about UCIe is that it’s an open standard,” says Chaudhry. “In all, there are about 120 members, and all of them are working together. There are six different working groups that range from mechanical to electrical to security to software and marketing, where they are bringing up new things as they are developing their chiplet-based designs. A lot of things that have happened between UCIe 1.0 and 1.1 are basically due to their input.”

—Ed Sperling contributed to this report.

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