Current Status and Future Trajectory of Chiplet Technology
In a keynote presentation at this year's Chiplet Summit, Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis, highlighted the growth and potential of the chiplet market. Handy, who has been covering the semiconductor market for a long time and has authored articles for Electronic Design, envisions chiplets evolving from early adoption to mainstream semiconductor manufacturing.
The market report titled "A Deep Look at New Memories," authored by Handy, is already available for readers. This report focuses on new memory technologies and provides insights into the future of memory markets. Meanwhile, Handy's forthcoming market report titled "Will HBM Rescue the DRAM Market?" is expected to provide solutions for the DRAM market.
Handy described the chiplet market as being at a pivotal growth phase, transitioning from niche usage to large-scale deployment. While chiplets have already been used in production chips for nearly a decade—for example, AMD’s Xilinx Virtex chips—the market is now poised for significant expansion.
Chiplet adoption is accelerating due to their advantages in overcoming the scaling challenges of traditional monolithic SoCs (system-on-chips). The market is expected to grow substantially as chiplets enable flexible, cost-effective assembly of complex chips using different process nodes and specialized functions. This approach addresses integration complexity and performance bottlenecks found in conventional monolithic designs.
Handy also referred to ongoing developments related to interconnect standards like UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express), which facilitate interoperability between chiplets. Future trends include expanding chiplet use in automotive AI accelerators, RF transceivers, and other specialized domains demanding heterogeneous integration.
The chiplet market growth is closely linked to advancements in memory technologies, as noted in Handy’s analysis in related market reports about High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and new memory architectures.
In summary, Handy envisions chiplets evolving from early adoption to mainstream semiconductor manufacturing, driven by needs for modularity, integration flexibility, and cost efficiency, alongside emerging industry standards and expanding applications across computing sectors.
A video of the keynote presentation can be found above for those who missed it. The market report "A Deep Look at New Memories" offers further insights into the future of chiplets and new memory technologies. The market report "Will HBM Rescue the DRAM Market?" is expected to provide solutions for the DRAM market in the near future.
Artificial-intelligence applications could find significant growth in the automotive sector, as Handy predicts the expansion of chiplet use in automotive AI accelerators. In the realm of technology, the chiplet market is poised to benefit from the development and refinement of artificial-intelligence.
