Designing new chips typically dredges up a host of challenges. Processor and memory scaling has slowed down, which is bad, but the cost of silicon has gone down as well, obviously a good thing. A paradigm shift is underway, too, with the move from monolithic system-on-chip (SoC) architectures to modular chiplet-based design frameworks. Chiplet technology takes advantage of these changes, especially considering disaggregation possibilities.
In his Chiplet Summit keynote, Boyd Phelps, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cadence's Silicon Solutions Group, talks about how the changeover to chiplets requires advanced tools, as well as the challenges that designers, foundries, and companies need to address (watch the video above).
Despite the challenges, including the need for dual foundry integration, there are many advantages (see figure) to using chiplets. Technologies such as cache-coherency protocols and details like power-management strategies are just part of the chiplet solution puzzle.
