Chiplets can now be combined from various manufacturers

Chiplets have been the trend in processor architecture for quite some time now. Several manufacturers are already using the concept to develop more flexible products. Now the major industry players have agreed on a common standard. Chiplets are basically the building blocks from which more complex SoCs can be assembled: for example, they contain some CPU cores, graphics units, and other prefabricated elements.

Depending on the need, these can then be put together in the form of building blocks and connected together to obtain complete semiconductor components for various purposes. While several companies have already worked with this concept, they essentially just developed chiplets from their own architectures, which they then assembled into finished chips. But now it should be easy to use components from other manufacturers, which can then be easily integrated into your own products under license.

The big companies in the industry have developed an open industry standard for this called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). This essentially describes the interface through which the individual chiplets can be interconnected. The standard is currently supported by Intel, AMD, ARM, Samsung, Qualcomm, and TSMC. As a result, it should technically no longer be a problem to develop a SoC that combines CPU cores with ARM designs with an AMD GPU and its own chipset for the rest of the hardware.

This could then easily be put into practice at TSMC and installed in your own hardware. While the interface standard UCIe 1.0 has been completed, there are still some areas to work on. This applies, for example, to the specific form factors in which the individual chiplets are designed to ensure the most compact integration on a chip.