Current Status and Future Prospects of the Chiplet Industry
Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis and author for Electronic Design, delivered a captivating keynote at this year's Chiplet Summit, shedding light on the burgeoning chiplet market and its potential to revolutionise the semiconductor industry.
Handy's presentation highlighted the fact that we are now at the cusp of large-scale adoption of chiplets, after nearly a decade of their use in production chips, such as AMD’s Xilinx Vertex chips. Chiplets are helping the industry overcome die size limitations while enabling higher performance and flexibility.
The keynote discussion encompassed several key points:
- The industry is transitioning towards widespread chiplet integration as a mainstream approach to scaling semiconductor performance and functionality.
- The potential for chiplet-based designs is expanding rapidly, supported by industry standards and ecosystem development.
- The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard plays a pivotal role by allowing high-bandwidth, low-latency, power-efficient, and interoperable connections between heterogeneous chiplets on a package.
- Chiplets provide a strategic advantage by breaking the reticle size limit constraints, allowing for more bespoke and modular system architectures.
- Handy also hinted that innovations like High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) integrated using chiplets may "rescue" or revitalize DRAM market segments.
Handy's insights underscore the transformative role of chiplets in reshaping chip design and manufacturing economics, moving from niche use cases to a mainstream industry paradigm driven by standards-driven interoperability and modular chip architectures.
Additionally, Handy's forthcoming market report, titled "Will HBM Rescue the DRAM Market?", will delve deeper into the potential impacts on the DRAM market. A video of his keynote presentation at the Chiplet Summit is available, providing an opportunity for those who missed the live event to gain insights into the growth and potential of the chiplet market, as well as the future potential of the DRAM market.
Moreover, Handy's new market report, titled "A Deep Look at New Memories," focuses on new memory technologies. This report allows for current insights into the advancements in memory technologies, a crucial aspect of the semiconductor industry's evolution.
As we stand at the beginning of using chiplets on a large scale, Handy's keynote presentation offers valuable insights into the future of the chiplet market and the exciting possibilities it holds for the semiconductor industry.
Data-and-cloud-computing technologies are expected to leverage the benefits of chiplets, as industry standards and ecosystem development continue to support the expansion of chiplet-based designs. The keynote discussion at the Chiplet Summit also highlighted the strategic advantage of chiplets, which breaks reticle size limit constraints, allowing for more bespoke and modular system architectures.
