According to Moore's Law, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. However, the monolithic design used in chip manufacturing makes it increasingly difficult for Moore's Law to remain true. This has caused AMD and Intel to start using "chiplets" in their products. Chiplets are small chips that are integrated into larger components in order to perform specific tasks.

Since the early days of chiplet use, the various manufacturers that have adopted this technology have used their own systems to interconnect them. However, as chiplets become more popular in CPU and GPU, the development of a standard chiplet interconnect system that is adopted across the industry will make it much easier to design and manufacture new chips that can use components from various ecosystems to create a SoC (System on a Chip).

The UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) consortium, which was formed by companies such as AMD, ASE, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Google, TSMC, Samsung, Arm and Qualcomm, aims to unify inter-chiplet interconnect technologies for use in GPU, CPU and SoC chips. At this time, UCIe version 1.0 specifies interconnect between chiplets at the physical layer, protocols, software model (including the PCI Express and CXL standards), and how to do conformance testing.

In addition to the advantages of modularity, the implementation of this new standard in the IC manufacturing industry can also accelerate the development of new technologies and lower manufacturing costs. Another advantage is that it can help mitigate IC shortages because manufacturers are not dependent on a single supplier.

In the second half of 2022, the consortium will start work on the next generation of the UCIe standard, which will define chiplet formats, management, security, and protocols

Written by: Joshua Wilson