Photo by Luan Gjokaj on Unsplash
Semiconductor products are struggling to meet the demand to balance power, performance, and area requirements. The challenge to enable efficiency is increasing while there is also a need to meet new technological requirements without adding bottlenecks. Such challenges are slowly becoming impossible tasks whereby the innovation is hitting a technical wall and is now pushing semiconductor design and manufacturing towards a new era.
To overcome these hurdles semiconductor industry is looking to increase the adoption rate of chiplets. Chiplet is also becoming a stepping stone toward the new era of silicon devices (mainly XPUs) that provide better power-performance management. Such a solution also allows more features while not worrying (for now) about bottlenecks.
The fundamental reason for adopting semiconductor solutions like chiplets is to ensure that the process technology can be efficiently used by disaggregating the solution across multiple blocks, thus ensuring the critical blocks get the most advanced solutions.
Market: Semiconductor XPU Market Is Running Into Bottleneck And Chiplets Are The Perfect Way Out Of It.
Stacking: Scaling Via Stacking Will Soon Run Into Stacking Wall And Chiplets Are Needed To Overcome It.
However, the adoption of chiplets at a large scale requires a semiconductor road. The inception of the semiconductor road for chiplets is the market, which has been demanding near-bottleneck free features to cater to the world that is processing data.
Adopting a chiplet solution is to overcome stacking-related thermal and mechanical issues. It has become a concern for XPU-type devices where the need to double the transistors is increasing faster than ever. It has also created new scaling-related hurdles. To solve the scaling bottleneck, chiplets provide a better avenue by allowing the more horizontal area to enable designers and manufacturers to bring new features.
The market requirement is for smaller but powerful silicon devices. It is a must-have for solutions that form the base of on-the-go computing systems like XPUs. However, slowly the ability the integrate more features without impacting the silicon area has become a bottleneck, mainly for the XPU designers. Such a bottleneck directly creates density issues which can potentially lower the performance metric of new solutions.
Chiplets are by default the better-known solutions to the density-related problem as it allows scaling to be done with the help of packages. However, for chiplets, it is important to consider the cost and time to manufacture. Otherwise, the positive technical impact of chiplets can easily get void by the negative business impact.
Density: Increasing Silicon Density To Cater PPA Requirement Is Demanding Chiplets Way Of Design And Manufacturing.
Era: Chiplets Provide The Perfect Avenue To Enter The Era Of Semiconductor Product Development.
The semiconductor industry is always looking for a solution that can enable a new type of semiconductor product. The ultimate goal of such solutions is to move the computing industry towards a new era. Chiplets do provide an avenue to do so and the semiconductor road taken by the industry has already started enabling a new type of chiplets-driven solutions that are also creating a new level of competition which is eventually going to benefit the industry at large.
The semiconductor market focused on XPUs is already demanding more chiplets-driven architecture, which in turn is enabling the solution to mitigate near-future scaling and density solutions, and this technical semiconductor road has certainly started the new era for the semiconductor industry and will also enable new types of devices.
