Lego-Style 'Chiplets' Stack Together To Drive Faster Artificial Intelligence.

"The artificial-intelligence boom is pushing chip makers to speed up development of designs that stack chips together like high-tech Lego pieces.

"Chiplets" can be an easier way to design more powerful chips, according to industry executives who call the technology one of the most significant advances since the dawn of the integrated circuit more than 60 years ago.

"A huge part of the future of semiconductors is packaging and chiplets," said International Business Machines head of research Dario Gil in an interview. "It's just much more powerful than having to design a massive chip from scratch."

Tech giants including Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. last year formed a coalition to create standards for designing chiplets. Nvidia, which has ridden the AI wave to become the world's first trillion-dollar chip company, joined later. IBM and some Chinese companies are members too.

Apple's high-end Mac Studio computer, introduced last year and updated in June, is among the early consumer products using a form of chiplet technology to connect two computing processors. The chips are made by TSMC. In recent months, Intel and Nvidia have each announced chiplet-based customized products.

A typical consumer device such as a smartphone contains many types of chip for functions including data processing, graphics processing, memory, telecommunications and power control. The chips are delicately tethered to minuscule wires and ensconced in a protective plastic casing, forming a package that can be fixed to a circuit board.

With the new chiplet packaging, engineers have found ways to bolt together pre-existing chips, the equivalent of using a few Lego pieces to build a toy car.

Wang Xiaoyang, an executive at Chinese chiplet startup M Square, compared chip designers to creators of recipes and chiplets to pre-prepared ingredients. Chip-design companies can toss together the ingredients they want, "and it's simple to cook up the dish and serve it right away on the table," he said in a company release.

The concept is particularly appealing to AI companies that are in a hurry to design chips optimized for the type of calculations used in AI.

Nvidia said its chiplet technology allowed its existing products such as graphics-processing chips to be connected with custom chips designed by companies with specialized needs.

As packing more transistors into a tiny space becomes ever more difficult, the stacking of chips "will be the primary mechanism for continuing to scale chip performance in a cost- and power-efficient way," Nvidia said in a report last year to the Commerce Department.

TSMC, the world's largest contract maker of chips, has its own platforms for clients to design chiplet-based products. The company, whose clients include Apple, said it expects its floor space for production in advanced packaging in 2025 to be twice what it was in 2021.

Companies are still working to bring down chiplets' production cost, with work continuing on how to stitch them together most effectively. Also, chiplets need a different process to verify performance, and they aren't suited to every function. People in the industry say chiplet designs are a good fit for products such as higher-end Apple desktops that sell for $4,000 and up, as opposed to being the main chips in current mass-market smartphones." [1]

1. Lego-Style 'Chiplets' Stack Together To Drive Faster Artificial Intelligence. Yang, Jie. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 11 July 2023: B.1.