UCIe technology is expected to bring innovations in semiconductor industry

The growing concern on the Semiconductor chip shortages have been aggravated by the pandemic. Manufacturing companies are increasing chip production – but the shortfall won't be resolved immediately. With the rising popularity of chiplets in semiconductors, market leaders in packaging, IP suppliers, foundries, and cloud service providers have joined forces to launch the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard to establish an open ecosystem for future technologies.

Industry leaders joining the initiative already include the likes of AMD, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Google, TSMC, Samsung, Arm, and Qualcomm, whereas Nvidia is notably absent from the grouping, despite exploring a chiplet path for its next-generation GPU designs. The UCIe 1.0 specification is a complete standardized die-to-die interconnect, encompassing a physical layer, protocol stack, software model, and compliance testing, a consortium said. It natively maps PCI Express (PCIe) and Compute Express Link (CXL) protocols. The spec will enable end users to mix and match dies and other chiplet components from multiple sources with different packaging options.

According to Gordon Moore, the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years (i.e., Moore's Law). However, maintaining this while using a monolithic design has gradually become more challenging, leading companies like AMD and Intel to use chiplet systems within their products. However, as chiplets become the new norm for CPUs and GPUs, developing an industry-wide standard would greatly help the industry, as manufacturing partners could use components from different ecosystems and still create an SoC with them.

Besides the modularity it brings, implementing the new standard across the chip industry would also speed up the development of new technologies and lower manufacturing costs for semiconductor companies. Moreover, it could help chip manufacturers deal with the ongoing chip shortage since they wouldn't be stuck with a single supplier. Going forward, there will be a need for integrating multiple chiplets in a package to deliver product innovation across market segments will be the future of the semiconductor industry.