Chiplets for Integration of Electronic Systems

Abstract

Scaling down of transistor sizes has made it possible to integrate billions of devices in the same chip, allowing us to build entire electronic systems into tiny “systems on chip” (SoC). For about four decades after the proclamation of Moore's law, device scaling resulted in improvements in area, performance as well as power. In the last two decades, many semiconductor manufacturers stopped investing in new technology nodes since the design, manufacturing, and test challenges in deep submicron technologies are far too steep. Today, semiconductor companies do not rely on improvements in photolithography alone to build more complex systems. Similarly, optimizations at gate level or register-transfer level through electronic design automation tools will not suffice to bring in order-of-magnitude increase in the complexity of SoC, since these tools are already mature. Therefore, optimization at the system level is the only logical step forward. Chiplets represent a system-level packaging innovation and there is much research and development in using this technology for building high-performance computing systems. We believe that it will be worthwhile to include the topic of system-level integration in a course on Very Large-Scale Integrated Circuit Design taught in the Universities and provide a tutorial treatment to help teachers and students.