Newsletter #1: Chiplets: The Talk of the Town!

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of yieldWerx Insights Newsletter!

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For decades, Moore's Law has stood the test of time. However, scientists believe that cramming more transistors on a chip won't remain feasible anymore, considering the skyrocketing demand for computing power.

In response, manufacturers are turning to smaller, more modular “chiplets” designed for specific functions (such as storing data or processing signals) that can be linked together to build a system. The smaller a chip, the fewer defects it’s likely to contain, making manufacturing less expensive.

MIT Technology Review places this technology on its 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024 list.

Kevin Zhang, SVP of Business Development at TSMC, discusses the present and future of the semiconductor industry.

• The global semiconductor industry is poised for significant revenue growth, expected to double by the decade's end, driven by AI and emerging technologies.
• Design-technology co-optimization (DTCO) is crucial for achieving optimal scaling benefits in semiconductor products.
• The automotive industry is transitioning towards silicon-defined vehicles, incorporating advanced semiconductors for autonomous capabilities.
• Semiconductor technology has evolved from transistor geometry reduction to innovating transistor architecture and materials.
• The semiconductor industry has achieved significant energy efficiency improvements, facilitating the emergence of AI technologies.

At Mobile World Congress this year, Qualcomm highlighted a powerful tool to improve semiconductor performance: Artificial Intelligence.

This is more of a traditional Machine-Learning-based AI and not the popular generative AI.

Meanwhile, some companies are trying to achieve more performance using heterogeneous compute architectures, some are using chiplets and others are using both.

The Snapdragon X80 utilizes AI to optimize 5G performance, improving quality of service, data speeds, power handling, efficiency, coverage, and latency. AI assists in managing multi-antenna subsystems efficiently and providing contextual inputs for optimizing radio links.

For the chiplet technology to work, there needs to be a universal chiplet ecosytem. Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) is the open industry standard interconnect, allowing chiplets from various suppliers to be packaged together.

This paper discusses that architectural approaches using UCIe can provide power, performance, and reliability characteristics comparable to or exceeding monolithic system-on-chip designs as bump pitch approaches 1 μm.

Contrary to traditional signalling interfaces, these architectures can achieve the most power-efficient performance by reducing the frequency as the bump pitch decreases.

Intel Foundry launches as the world’s first systems foundry for the AI era.

Intel also announced that its "five nodes in four years" (5N4Y) process roadmap remains on track.

At the same event, Microsoft revealed plans to produce chip designs on Intel's 18A process.

Among the participants and speakers were U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Arm CEO Rene Haas, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others.

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