Arm and its ecosystem partners are collaborating to establish standards that will promote the growth of the chiplet market. This effort aims to advance the next phase of silicon development, addressing the challenge of enhancing performance while optimizing efficiency and managing manufacturing costs.
Chiplets represent a key solution in the increasingly intricate AI-accelerated computing landscape. These smaller dies, when combined, form larger and more sophisticated systems that can be bundled and marketed as a single solution. This approach offers new design possibilities, particularly in enabling manufacturers to create custom silicon by leveraging a set of existing or standardized chiplets. The concept of composability—building a tailored complete solution by reusing optimized chiplets—has generated significant excitement and is expected to foster a multi-vendor chiplet supply chain, opening up performance and differentiation opportunities for both new and established players in the industry.
In order to fully realize the potential of chiplets, it is crucial to establish common frameworks that address non-differentiating choices in chiplet partitioning and their impact on interface standardization. Arm and more than 20 partners are working on the Arm Chiplet System Architecture (CSA) initiative, aiming to define optimal partitioning choices for chiplet-based systems. This initiative seeks to facilitate greater reusability of components across multiple suppliers, covering various market segments and spearheading standardization in system design choices for different chiplet types.
Additionally, the AMBA specifications, such as AXI and CHI, are being updated to standardize protocols for chiplets. The AMBA CHI C2C specification, which leverages existing on-chip CHI protocol, has been formally released after collaboration with industry partners. Furthermore, plans are in place to deliver an open AXI C2C specification that can be adopted by silicon vendors currently utilizing AXI in their single chip designs. This collaborative effort seeks to enable partners to decompose an Arm-based system across multiple chiplets, akin to how a monolithic chip is composed of IP blocks.
In conjunction with these initiatives, collaboration is also ongoing in areas such as defining the physical layer for data transportation between chiplets within a package, standardizing protocols for system aggregation, and reaching consensus on valuable partitioning schemes for Arm-based systems using AMBA protocols. While widespread adoption of chiplets may take time, the potential of these standards to accelerate the development of chiplet-based systems is a source of excitement. Arm's flexible platform is propelling the emerging chiplet ecosystem, and the company is committed to delivering the computing, performance efficiency, and software solutions required in an increasingly complex landscape. Through critical standards and programs like the Arm Total Design, the ecosystem is being brought together to cultivate a thriving and diverse chiplet ecosystem built on Arm.
