Chiplet Technology in Automotive Applications: A Cost-Effective Path to Advanced Electronics

By Mukanzu Mujinga Placido, embedded.com | December 15, 2025

Let us emphasize first and foremost the economic case for chiplet architecture in the automotive systems.

The automotive industry faces an unprecedented challenge: integrating increasingly sophisticated electronic systems while maintaining cost competitiveness in mass production. Traditional monolithic System-on-Chip (SoC) designs, while functionally robust, present significant economic barriers when scaled to automotive volumes. Chiplet technology emerges as a compelling solution, offering substantial cost advantages through modularity, yield optimization, and design reuse of IP blocks.

Consider a typical advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) controller that requires high-performance computing cores, specialized AI accelerators, multiple communication interfaces, and power management circuits. In a monolithic approach, this entire system would be fabricated as a single large chip on an expensive advanced process node (such as 7nm or 5nm). If any portion of this large die has manufacturing defects, the entire chip becomes unusable, resulting in poor yield.

The chiplet approach fundamentally changes this economic equation. Instead of one large chip, the same ADAS controller can be implemented using multiple smaller chips: a CPU chiplet on 7nm for performance, memory interface chiplets on 22nm for cost efficiency, analog RF chiplets on specialized processes, and power management on mature 65nm nodes. Each chiplet can be manufactured independently, tested separately, and only the known-good dies are assembled into the final package. This approach typically reduces overall system costs by 20-40% while improving manufacturing yields from 60-70% to over 90%.

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