Monolithic SoC design, while aiming to integrate numerous IPs on the same process technology, leads to cost inefficiencies, longer design cycles, limited performance scalability, and unnecessary updates for all IPs, even when only one requires changes. A shift to chiplet-based architectures addresses many of these challenges.

Today’s chip designers need to achieve four main goals as part of their next-generation design process:

Cost Efficiency: Chiplets can be more cost-effective and help manage complexity by allowing engineers to concentrate on their unique value-added contributions while improving time-to-market, minimizing risks, and reducing costs. They enable engineers to collaborate with partners on advanced node design and complex IP integration.

Customization: Chiplets provide more modularity, which facilitates product scalability and customization. Low-end, mid-range, and high-end systems can be built by scaling the same set of chiplets. A scalable product built around the same set of chiplets provides a common architecture and software environment.
Configuration Management: Chiplets enable improved portfolio management. A complete product roadmap can be developed around the same set of chiplets, and chiplets can be reused when defining and building next-generation products. If only the CPU or NPU chiplet needs an update, customers can update that specific chiplet and reuse their I/O and other chiplets for their next-gen products.