VeriSilicon's Dai Weimin: From IP Chip to Chip Platform

On December 22, at the 2021 China Integrated Circuit Design Industry Annual Conference and Wuxi Integrated Circuit Industry Innovation and Development Summit Forum (ICCAD 2021), Dai Weimin, founder, chairman and president of VeriSilicon, delivered a speech entitled "The Road to Industrialization of Chiplet"

In recent years, with the accelerated development of the semiconductor industry, several major bottlenecks faced by the industry have gradually become prominent and need to be resolved urgently: on the one hand, Moore's Law is unsustainable, and the design cost and complexity of advanced process chips have increased significantly; on the other hand, market demand has become more diversified, the innovation cycle has shortened, and the demand for customized chips on the application side has continued to increase.

Dai Weimin took Apple products as an example. The number of transistors in its mobile phone chips has increased significantly as the characteristic line width has decreased, and the performance has been continuously upgraded. However, the decrease in characteristic line width has also brought about a decrease in performance growth rate. This is because the interconnection delay has an increasingly greater impact on the design. The continuous growth in the size of CPUs, FPGAs, and network chips will also lead to performance degradation.

In this context, Chiplet, with its shorter interconnect length and new chip architecture, is gradually seen as the key to breaking through the above bottlenecks and becoming the next blue ocean in the semiconductor industry. Omdia predicts that the global market size of chiplet processor chips will grow from US$645 million in 2018 to US$5.8 billion in 2024 and to US$57 billion in 2035.

According to Dai Weimin, smaller dies bring higher silicon utilization and higher yields. Compared with monolithic integrated chips, chips composed of two, three, and four chiplets have significantly improved wafer yields at the same size, and chiplets are most cost-effective for large chips with almost no redundancy.

"Devices will change from 'can be integrated on a single silicon chip, and the number of devices will grow exponentially' to 'integrated in multiple ways, and the functional density within the system space will continue to grow.'" Dai Weimin quoted "Microsystem Based on SiP Technology" and further pointed out that "chiplets will continue Moore's Law."

Dai Weimin proposed the "four new transformations" that Chiplet will bring: IP chipization, that is, Chiplet is the reuse of IP at the silicon wafer level; integrated heterogeneity, that is, packaging multiple small chips based on different process nodes and manufactured separately into one chip; integrated heterogeneity, that is, packaging small chips based on Si, GaN, SiC, InP and other materials together through heterogeneous integration technology; IO increment, that is, the increment of horizontal interconnection (RDL) and vertical interconnection (TSV).

From the perspective of IP chipization, Chiplet has undoubtedly brought new opportunities and challenges to major IP manufacturers. Among the many manufacturers, VeriSilicon, founded in 2001, is a company that relies on its own semiconductor IP to provide customers with platform-based, all-round, one-stop chip customization services and semiconductor IP licensing services.

With rich IP reserves, VeriSilicon is currently the largest semiconductor IP supplier in mainland China and the seventh in the world. Its growth rate ranks second among the top seven and its IP types rank top two among the top seven, including neural network NPU, graphics GPU, video VPU, audio/voice DSP, image signal ISP, display processing IP, compression/encryption, and computing GPGPU.

Regarding chiplet technology, VeriSilicon proposed the concept of IP as a Chiplet (IaaC), that is, IP chipization, which aims to achieve "plug and play" of special function IP with chiplets, solve the balance between performance and cost in 7nm, 5nm and below processes, and reduce the design time and risk of larger-scale chips, from IP in SoC to IP presented in chiplet form in SiP.

Another concept is Chiplet as a Service, i.e. chip platformization. In terms of one-stop chip customization services, VeriSilicon currently tapes out 30-50 chips per year, ships 10,000 14nm FinFET wafers, and nearly 30,000 10nm FinFET wafers. The world's first batch of 7nm EUV tapes out successfully in 2018, and the current design capability has been expanded to 5nm, which is a key indicator of China's semiconductor design capabilities to enhance its competitiveness.

Dai Weimin further stated that in the future, three major areas will put forward more demands for chiplets, including laptop high-end processors, autonomous driving, and data centers. At present, some customers have put forward the demand for data centers. "With these three targets, the 'chicken and egg' problem can be solved. VeriSilicon may be one of the first companies in mainland China to launch related products."