Imec’s automotive-chiplet program grows to 10 participants

By now, ten companies from the automotive-IC supply chain, including Arm, BMW, Bosch and Siemens, have signed up for Imec’s Automotive Chiplet Program, the Leuven-based research institute revealed at the Automotive Chiplet Forum 2024. The program, which was first announced last year, aims to introduce the chiplet architecture and packaging technologies in automotive chip design and manufacturing to increase flexibility, improve performance and realize cost savings.

Carmakers have been integrating chip technology into their vehicles since the late 1970s. Lately, however, traditional chip architectures have struggled to meet the requirements of ever more demanding automotive solutions, such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and immersive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) services. Enter chiplets – modular chips that are specifically designed to perform specialized functions efficiently and can be seamlessly combined to create more sophisticated compute systems.

“The adoption of chiplet technology would signal a disruptive shift in central vehicle computer design, offering distinct advantages over traditional monolithic approaches. Chiplets facilitate rapid customization and upgrades while reducing development time and costs,” explains Bart Placklé, vice president of automotive technologies at Imec. “However, moving to a chiplet architecture is prohibitively expensive for OEMs if done in isolation. Commercial viability thus hinges on industry alignment around a set of chiplet standards, enabling car manufacturers to procure chiplets from the market and integrate them with proprietary chiplets to build unique offerings.”

Companies developing supercomputing, data center and smartphone solutions have long explored the benefits of chiplet technology to meet their rapidly increasing computing needs. However, the automotive industry has been somewhat more reluctant to embrace the paradigm due to the unique challenges it faces. These include reliability, cost and energy efficiency requirements. Imec’s Automotive Chiplet Program addresses these issues in a pre-competitive, collaborative research effort. The participants are Arm, ASE, BMW Group, Bosch, Cadence Design Systems, Siemens, Siliconauto, Synopsys, Tenstorrent and Valeo.