The Chip Insider®– Chiplet Integration Strategies for AI and HBM
Author: G. Dan Hutcheson
The latest Chip Insider® blog breaks down chiplet integration strategies for AI and HBM, comparing system-down and chip-up approaches, economic impacts, and AMD's success in leveraging chiplets to gain market share.
Summary: The concept of chiplet Integration is far from new. It has been around since Jack Kilby invented the first integrated circuit by wire bonding multiple discrete devices in a single package …
Strategies: There are two essential strategic approaches to a decision to design-in chiplets: the first is from the system down to achieve greater compute performance with less power to drive efficiency...
The first strategic approach comes from a system-down perspective of tolerating an expensive package that will pay for itself in higher customer value. Hence, the chip maker can charge more. Nvidia’s AI GPU series are perfect examples of this approach today…
The second strategic approach comes from the opposite … chip-up perspective of trying to lower the cost of a large monolithic die. Early in the design, the economic approach to determine which is more cost-effective – packing everything into a single, monolithic die or disaggregating the design into a polylithic set of die is very different than conventional single die or classical COO analysis. Unlike conventional COO cost analysis, where there is a universal value for the cost of a wafer, the economics of heterogeneous are design, multi-process, and yield-dependent.
So let’s run through some numbers of how the economics change… Its economic advantage can deliver powerful competitive advantage.
Strategic Advantage: AMD has proven this approach is more than just a simple exercise in chiplet economics by taking share from Intel in Client and Datacenter CPU markets. In the early 2010s AMD was facing difficult choices… AMD had to do something different.
AMD’s core strength was CPU architecture. At the time, Intel’s was process technology and cost leadership … especially when it came to large-die monolithic ICs… Bryan Black, Ph.D., was one of the few who had long lobbied for breaking the design up into a multi-chip approach... So, AMD has steadily gained market share from Intel with a chip-up chiplet strategy.
HBM Chiplet strategy and economics…
“Cost is important... Value is decisive." — G. Dan Hutcheson
