Chiplets Get Physical: The Days of Mix-and-Match Silicon Draw Nigh

https://www.eejournal.com/article/chiplets-get-physical-the-days-of-mix-and-match-silicon-draw-nigh/

13•transpute•2d ago

Comments

vessenes•46m ago

Can someone experienced in this space explain this to me in mid-tier engineering terms? Are chiplets physically connected chips that come from different wafers? Or are they designs that can be ‘dragged and dropped’? If they’re physically connected (pre-packaging? Post-packaging?) how is this different than putting them on a board with interconnects?

If it’s design-level, and tapeout needs to happen for a given chiplet design, why does the article mention different process nodes? And also, how is this different than any fabs available IP?

Thanks!

nerdsniper•35m ago

The difference is that until recently, consumers could swap/add RAM/NPU/GPU/etc. Now they're more often epoxied together on the same chip, even if they were produced on two different silicon wafers.

For example, the newer Intel Lunar Lake chip packages together a CPU+iGPU+NPU chiplet and two LPDDR5X RAM chiplets[0][1]. If laptop manufacturers want to offer different amounts of RAM, they have to buy a different CPU SKU for 16GB RAM vs 32GB RAM. Panther Lake, the succeeding generation, reversed this and will support off-package RAM modules, but some reasonable people might assume that in the long term RAM will generally be on-package for anything that's not a server/HEDT.

You won't have to worry about making sure the RAM you buy is on the CPU & Motherboard QVL list, but also you won't ever buy RAM by itself at all.

0: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130561288@N04/albums/721777203...

1: (pages 3 and 4) https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/8244...

icegreentea2•29m ago

Chiplets are different physical chips, potentially from different nodes or processes. They're physically connected prepackaging. It's beneficial compared to sticking them on a board because then you get the shortest interconnects, and you aren't limited by pinout density. This should let you get the best bandwidth to power ratio, and better latency.

IshKebab•27m ago

> Are chiplets physically connected chips that come from different wafers?

Yes exactly. Take separate unpackaged chips, and put them all on one shared substrate (a "silicon interposer") that has wires to connect them. There are a bunch of different technologies to connect them. You can even stack dies.

https://www.imec-int.com/en/articles/chiplets-piecing-togeth...

I think typically you wouldn't stack logic dies due to power/cooling concerns (though you totally could). But you can definitely stack RAM (both SRAM and DRAM). Stacking is kind of a new process though as far as I understand it.

wmf•27m ago

Chiplets are separate dies that come from different wafers. (It used to be called multi-chip modules (MCM) back in the day but now it's chiplets.) You can see the chiplets pretty clearly in photos of e.g. AMD Ryzen.

The benefit of multiple dies on one package is that on-package wires are denser and shorter which increases performance. Multiple chiplets on an interposer is even better.

https://imapsource.org/article/128222-enabling-heterogenous-...

LoganDark•3m ago

Wait, aren't multi-chip modules assembled out of chiplets?

jauntywundrkind•45m ago

Intel has such a strong lead here, with Foveros doing stacked chips including ram (since the amazing, under-rated Lakefield), and with really good EIMB.

AMD is pretty famous for multi-chip, but they're only recently starting to do actually advanced integrating like Sea-of-Wires between chips. So far most of their chips have had big hot PHY to send data back & forth, rather than trying to make multiple chips that really can communicate directly with each other.

Interesting days ahead. The computer is on the chip now. A smaller domain of system building, with many of the same trade-offs & design challenges that it took to build a box.

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Comments

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