| | | To Keep Pace With Moore's Law, Chipmakers Turn to 'Chiplets'
Tom Simonite
11.06.18 02:00 pm
In 2016, the chip industry’s clock ran out.
For 50 years, the number of transistors that could be squeezed onto a piece of silicon had increased on a predictable schedule known as Moore’s law. The doctrine drove the digital evolution from minicomputers to PCs to smartphones and the cloud by cramming more transistors onto each generation of microchip, making them more powerful. But as the smallest features of transistors reached about 14 nanometers, smaller than the tiniest viruses, the industry fell off its self-imposed pace. The 2016 edition of a biennial report that usually renewed an industry pledge to sustain Moore’s law abandoned that focus to consider alternative paths forward. “We're seeing Moore's law slowing,” says Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer at chip designer AMD. “You’re still getting more density but it costs more and takes longer. It’s a fundamental change.”
That slowdown is forcing chipmakers to look for alternate ways to boost computers’ performance—and convince customers to upgrade. Papermaster is part of an industry-wide effort around a new doctrine of chip design that Intel, AMD, and the Pentagon all say can help keep computers improving at the pace Moore’s law has conditioned society to expect.
The new approach comes with a snappy name: chiplets. You can think of them as something like high-tech Lego blocks. Instead of carving new processors from silicon as single chips, semiconductor companies assemble them from multiple smaller pieces of silicon—known as chiplets. “I think the whole industry is going to be moving in this direction,” Papermaster says. Ramune Nagisetty, a senior principal engineer at Intel, agrees. She calls it “an evolution of Moore’s law.”
continues at wired.com |
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