3D-IC For The Masses

Advanced assemblies have enabled an unprecedented rate of advancement in the data center, especially for neural processing, but can it expand beyond that?

By Brian Bailey, SemiEngineering | March 13, 2025

The concepts of 3D-IC and chiplets have the whole industry excited. It potentially marks the next stage in the evolution of the IP industry, but so far, technical difficulties and cost have curtailed its usage to just a handful of companies. Even within those, they do not appear to be seeing benefits from heterogeneous integration or reuse.

Attempts to make this happen are not new. “A decade ago, we were trying to create an architecture for building chiplets,” says Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology and CTO of custom solutions at Marvell. “We had noble goals that were very democratic about being able to define a structure where people could put multiple chiplets together to build a given function. The magic was that by putting these smaller chips together, we could use much less power-hungry interfaces. We could take what used to be a big, power-hungry, complex, expensive system and build it into a chiplet-based system that could be more efficient overall. More importantly, it would save tons of development costs and save a lot in overall chip cost. It didn’t turn out that way. We ended up with a scenario where just a small number of companies, which you can count on your fingers, had the capability to develop chiplets.”

So why do it?

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