Why We Invested in Silicon Box and the Advanced Chiplet Packaging
The year was 2015 and, as happens annually, the world’s foremost experts in integrated circuits were coming together for the always highly anticipated technical discussion and exchange of ideas at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). In this renowned forum, surrounded by some of the brightest minds in the world, Dr. Sehat Sutardja, founder and then CEO of Marvell Technology, introduced his vision of chiplet architecture to the industry [Figure 1]. In his presentation, “The Future of IC Design Innovation”, he drew attention to the — at the time — overlooked limitations in circuitry and semiconductor technology that was the monolithic architecture of a chip. Dr. Sutardja provided a critical perspective (in much more eloquent words) that while chips could continue getting smaller and faster, the constraints of design and performance would remain as long as a monolithic-architecture paradigm remained. Demonstrating incredible vision and creativity, he suggested the innovation of small modular “chiplets”, which could be packaged and combined to form a complete system-on-chip (SoC) [1].
Fast forward eight short years from that meeting to 2023. The age of “Big Data” is truly upon us, with more information than ever before generated every day — millions of terabytes — along with the associated massive demand for power and the ever-increasing cost of it all (both energy and electronic material components). In the very same forum, ISSCC2023, Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, laid out the problem candidly [2]:
