TSMC Creates The 3DFabric Alliance To Accelerate Chiplet Design

You Get A Chiplet! And You Get A Chiplet! You All Get …

AMD has made many bets over the years; most of which have eventually panned out, albeit too late to pay off to the extent they’d originally hoped. From hitting the gigahertz mark to offering a true multi-core CPU, AMD have been first to market but somehow their innovations never took off until the competition adopted it.  It seems that chiplets are no exception to this tradition, just ask Apple, Intel and now TSMC.

TSMC liked fabbing chiplets so much that they are forming the 3DFabric Alliance to help that part of the industry migrate from the monolithic to the modular.   The 3DFabric Alliance is looking to advance system-on-integrated-chips, integrated-fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, and other related technologies, some of which have widespread adoption and others that are set to spread throughout the industry in the coming years.

The other reason TSMC is looking for an alliance is Intel and Samsung.  Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s CEO, is talking up EMIB, Foveros 2D and 3D multi-die packaging technologies and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express.  Samsung has launched their own initiative to try to attract customers to their own solutions.  In both of those cases the product they are peddling are chiplets and on die interconnects, rebranded but still the same idea.  

The good news is that regardless of who’s standard spreads, we will benefit from it.