Semiconductor R&D organization imec has allied with carmakers to add chiplets to automotive silicon that will expand the adoption of AI in cars. The idea promises to put people and their autos on better speaking terms.
At an October meeting in Detroit—the U.S. auto capital—imec announced that Arm, ASE, BMW, Bosch, Cadence, Siemens, SiliconAuto, Synopsys, Tenstorrent and Valeo are the first to join its Automotive Chiplet Program, a new pre-competitive research effort. The group will evaluate chiplet architectures and packaging technologies to support carmakers’ high-performance computing and strict safety requirements, while providing chiplet benefits like increased flexibility, improved performance and cost savings.
Chiplets developed by the alliance promise to double the processing power of today’s cars by around 2030. For example, the P7+ electric sedan introduced by China’s Xpeng in October runs two Nvidia Orin X chips to provide 508 TOPS of compute with data from eleven cameras, three millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors. Imec expects autos powered by a new breed of chiplet designs to double that number to 1,000 TOPS.
“It becomes hard to build that compute as a single monolithic SoC,” imec Automotive Program director Kurt Herremans told EE Times. “That’s where chiplets come in.”
While he was at Intel, Herremans was a system architect for chip designs that went into cars.
Shorter cycles
There is a huge push to shorten automotive development cycles even as advanced, often AI-based applications in the vehicle need more processor power, TechInsights Automotive Practice VP Ian Riches told EE Times.
“A large, powerful monolithic IC will likely always offer the best performance, but at a cost that is measurable in terms of both time and money,” he said. “The scalability and adaptability of chiplets, along with the potential for both a speedier time-to-market and lower development costs, is thus proving highly attractive to many automotive players. Imec timescales look possible. There is certainly huge interest.”
Trends in car evolution will require chiplets for autos by 2030, Herremans says.
“A vehicle in 2030 will need an amount of compute that we believe can no longer be provided by a monolithic SoC. The electronics involved here and the actual chiplet products—the first variant of this device—2will have to be ready by 2027. From now to 2027, we’ll have to work on prototypes and proofs of concept and things like that.”
AI in autos
The move toward chiplets is expected to bring more AI features to cars.
“We expect AI algorithms like large language models to be used in the interaction with passengers or drivers to enable a more natural conversation,” Herremans said. “This could be things like assisting with finding functions of the car, which grows complex. This obviously is still a domain of many innovations.”
Innovative Chinese companies like Xpeng are leading established carmakers like Volkswagen and General Motors in the EV business. Xpeng, BYD and others are poised to overtake the established carmakers in the next 10 years by selling EVs at lower prices with more driver assistance features.
One of the biggest impacts of the imec alliance—if it succeeds—will be to shorten design cycles, Riches said. China’s upstart EV makers have an advantage in updating their models more quickly than the established carmakers.
“That (shorter design cycles) will favor lithe, nimble players,” he warns. “The adjectives do not describe all current automotive players!”
The automotive supply chain has stratified with OEMs like BMW atop Tier-1 suppliers making assemblies like cockpits and door systems and Tier-2 companies providing control or radio units. Few chipmakers, except Nvidia, sell directly to automakers at the top.
With chiplets, that hierarchy could change.
“Can we talk about a pure-play Tier-1 or is it more like a Tier-0.5 because they also take much more of a platform responsibility?” Herremans asks. “We expect chiplets to indeed change that supply chain quite a bit. This obviously is still a domain of many innovations.”
Herremans expects the emergence of a new supply chain with companies that specialize in chiplets for CPUs, GPUs and AI compute. That vision has not materialized yet.
“The jury is still out on that one,” Riches said. “With companies like Renesas getting heavily into chiplets, it seems there is also a vision for single suppliers to offer ‘ready-built’ chiplet products to meet the market needs.”
Power in numbers?
Herremans anticipates more companies will join the chiplet alliance.
“We expect other companies from across the whole automotive chain, OEMs included,” he said. “From an OEM to a Tier-1 to a Tier-2 to even assembly and process companies like outsourced assembly and test and foundries, we have to really have all of those join.”
The program’s only major OEM so far is BMW.
Imec says its Automotive Chiplet Program leverages the company’s track record in advanced 2.5D and 3D chip packaging at the same time as ASE, the world’s largest outsourced assembly and test (OSAT), has also joined the program as a founding member.
“ASE is an OSAT that could do the assembly of multiple chiplets coming from other foundries,” Herremans said. “We definitely identify a need for heterogeneous integration as a requirement. That brings challenges, though, because these chiplets come from different foundries. They may have different finalization steps. We need to look at what it takes to accept these heterogeneous chiplets and make sure that when you assemble them as a system and package that we still get a reliable connection between the chiplets.”
Unprecedented
According to TSMC EVP Yuh-Jier Mii, the chip industry will soon be moving into the unprecedented 7-nm process node for autos with next-level L4 and L5 autonomous driving. Currently, L5 is the ultimate level where a vehicle needs no human intervention under any condition, including off-road.
Car chips will have some of the world’s most advanced process nodes, according to Mii.
“Because of the need to have hundreds and even thousands of TOPS, we see the trend moving from 5 nm to 3 nm,” he said at an imec event in Antwerp earlier this year. “This is a revolutionary change in the automotive industry.”
Less advanced foundries should also have space to compete.
“We really expect chiplets to come from different foundries, foundries that all have different node capabilities or process capabilities optimized to each chiplet’s requirements for I/O, or maybe a specific transistor,” Herremans said. “The question is who assembles those chiplets? You have the foundries that move towards advanced packaging and have their own assembly capabilities, focusing a bit more towards silicon connectivity. You also have the OSAT ecosystem that is more in the space of organic and interconnect transform. Depending on exactly the performance needs of your system, I think both options are a possibility.”
https://www.eetimes.com/imec-chipset-alliance-aims-to-expand-ai-to-cars/
