The Chiplet Summit, the first conference dedicated to chiplets, will be held January 24-26. This is an important milestone for the industry, as the technology has officially “arrived” and is now recognized as a key trend that will shape the future of the semiconductor industry. Chip designers cannot miss this event if they want to remain competitive in the market. They will get the latest information on how to make chiplets run faster, scale better, consume less power and be more flexible.
The Chiplet Summit is brought to you by the organizers of the successful Flash Memory Summit and is expected to be a sell-out. The conference will offer attendees a place to network with peers, ask questions of experts and talk to vendors offering a wide variety of products and services. The lineup of keynote speakers includes notable industry leaders, including Daniel Armburst, co-founder of Silicon Catalyst, who will speak on “How Chiplets Can Help You Benefit from Chips for America.” This topic is especially relevant as the semiconductor industry has evolved over six decades from its origins in startups, venture capital and vertically integrated companies to a fast-growing, horizontally integrated and concentrated supply chain. Chiplets are one of the major trends that will determine the future winners and losers and the resulting industry structure.
Chiplets will also be essential to accelerate startup innovation and address designer productivity. While die aggregation has become a reality for many major companies, replicating that success for aggregation of commonly available chiplet packaging has yet to be achieved. To get to a vibrant world of standards-based chiplets several critical business model and ecosystem development challenges are necessary. With the passage of the $52 billion CHIPS Act in the U.S. and similar initiatives in other parts of the world, there should be ample opportunity to accelerate timelines and benefits for industry, government and academic stakeholders.
For chiplets to work, there must be an ecosystem that documents the provenance of the chiplet and that’s what TSMC already does for EDA tools, commercial IP and other critical parts of design enablement. No one builds ecosystems better than TSMC, and it’s like a snowball rolling down Everest. The semiconductor IP industry stands to gain as well. Chiplets puts the focus back on IP licensing. Charging per chip is truly the holy grail of intellectual property and something Wall Street respects greatly. With chiplets, dies will be sold, so it is more of a chip sale than a royalty set. This should drastically simplify the process of monetizing chiplet IP and be very attractive to Wall Street, VCs and other funders in the semiconductor ecosystem.
