Waiting for Chiplet Standards

The need and desire for chiplets is increasing, but for most companies that shift will happen slowly until proven standards are in place.

Interoperability and compatibility depend on many layers and segments of the supply chain coming to agreement. Unfortunately, fragmented industry requirements may lead to a plethora of solutions.

Standards always have enabled increasing specialization. In the early days of the chip industry, a company had to design, implement, and fabricate everything. For most companies, fabrication became separated from design by well-defined interfaces and models, such as PDKs, BSIM models, and libraries.

The emergence of the IP industry enabled companies to concentrate on the design of the system and the pieces that provided them with differentiation, but they still had to do most of the implementation themselves. Standards for interconnect and the models that were transferred between IP provider and consumer made this possible.

Today, we are on the cusp of another level of specialization, where a company will only design the system — and design and implement the pieces of the system that provide differentiation — without having to worry about the implementation or fabrication of commodity parts of the design. These would be available in the form of chiplets, which are fully implemented and fabricated pieces that can be assembled with custom silicon to form a system. To get there, the industry needs some new standards.

The pioneering work has been done by large systems companies, which own both the system and the chiplets. (See figure 1.) This enables them to make larger, or more modular offerings, and along the way to iron out many of the kinks. They have developed proprietary means to make these systems.

Unsurprisingly, there is significant variation in those solutions. “The industry is divided up into a range of offerings, simply because there was a need by ASIC companies,” says Ketan Mehta, senior director of SoC IP product marketing at OpenFive. “They are building custom silicon, and they want solutions right away. They don’t want to wait for the standards to be developed and evolve. So proprietary implementations are being developed and proven in all these companies.”

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