Open Chiplet Platform (Image: Intel)
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake:
With all the talk of chiplets, it is important to have a perspective on what the real issues are, and where the industry stands with them. Looking into it, we find three categories of answers.
Chiplets, systems in package, multi-die modules — there is a whole new vocabulary growing up around the old idea of putting more than one die into an IC package. By now the words, the technologies they represent, and the supply chains necessary to achieve them are resolving into three main categories, all under the general heading of multi-die modules (MDM).
The first category — well represented by recent massive GPU and datacenter CPU designs — best fits the acronym SiP. The second category — just emerging today — we might call decomposed SoCs. And the third category — arguably still several years away — we can properly call chiplet-based systems. To define each of these, we should discuss the issues that separate them and the issues they have in common.