Chiplets are a great example of a solution that’s been around for a while but is quickly finding more problems to solve. With Moore’s Law now 55 years old and pace of semiconductor manufacturing advancement decelerating, chiplets offer an approach to semiconductor design and integration that hold the promise of speeding up things up again. Recent research released by Omdia forecasts the global market for processor microchips that use chiplets in their manufacturing process to hit $5.8 billion in 2024, a significant jump from $645 million in 2018.
Tom Hackenberg, Omdia’s principal analyst for embedded processors, said chiplets will enable the semiconductor business to return to the customary rate of progress initial set my Moore’s Law by effectively bypassing it. Chiplets replace a single silicon die with multiple smaller dies that work together in a unified packaged solution, which provides much more silicon to add transistors compared to a monolithic microchip. He said this would enable a return to the two-year doubling cycle that has been the economic foundation of the semiconductor business since 1965.
As revolutionary as their promise appears, chiplets are not a new concept, said Hackenberg. “The whole process of shrinking solutions has been around for a long time.” Over time, progress has been made at the system to the board level and then down to the chip level. “Now we’re talking about a next generation iteration where functionality is being designed in at a sub-chip level where, or what we would call a chiplet.
