Driving European semiconductor leadership: A chiplet-based approach for the automotive sector

The automotive industry is transitioning from combustion engines to:

• Electrified powertrains

• Safe, connected and autonomous driving

• Enhanced in-cabin experiences.

Advanced semiconductors are needed to support this transition in automotive applications.
The compute performance required to enable autonomous driving is increasing, as are the development costs for advanced nodes. This is in sharp contrast to the number of cars produced annually (approx. 90 million units).
Chiplets offer an opportunity to disaggregate large, monolithic semiconductor designs, making them more flexible and cost-effective. Specifically for automotive applications, most of today's semiconductors are legacy nodes that have been developed and hardened for automotive use over several decades. Integrating these semiconductors with the latest CPU and GPU technologies enables the required performance to be achieved while dealing with boundary conditions in terms of market size and specific automotive requirements.
Chiplets are already widely used in various computing applications, ranging from client devices (e.g. notebooks) to HPC platforms.
With 40 years of semiconductor R&D leadership, imec's Automotive Chiplet Program aims to reduce risk and accelerate semiconductor innovation in the automotive sector. The program will develop quality and reliability measures, drive standard interfaces between chiplets, and build reference architectures with the support of ACP partners. The aim is to develop chiplet-based reference designs that can be industrialised by the automotive ecosystem.