Alphawave Semi, a global leader in high-speed connectivity and compute silicon, has announced the successful tape-out of the industry’s first off-the-shelf multi-protocol I/O connectivity chiplet on TSMC’s 7nm process. This significant achievement combines the company’s flexible and customizable connectivity IP, custom silicon, and advanced packaging capabilities. The result is a 7nm multi-standard I/O chiplet that delivers a standards-compliant IP portfolio of Ethernet, PCIe®, CXL®, and UCIe™ (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) Revision 1.1 products.
Chiplets are becoming crucial in high-performance compute (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications due to their ability to provide essential connectivity at higher bandwidths and lower power consumption compared to traditional infrastructure technologies. By opting for commercial off-the-shelf chiplets, customers can enhance performance and efficiency while enjoying reduced development times, lower costs, and increased flexibility with their existing hardware ecosystems.
The Alphawave Semi chiplet offers a total bandwidth of up to 1.6 Tbps, enabling up to 16 lanes of multi-standard PHY that support silicon-proven PCIe 6.0, CXL 3.x, and 800G Ethernet in various mixed operating modes. The successful tape-out announcement marks a significant step towards establishing a robust, open chiplet ecosystem. This ecosystem is set to accelerate connectivity for high-performance AI systems by utilising UCIe as a die-to-die connectivity subsystem. Recently, at the Chiplet Summit 2024 in Santa Clara, CA, Alphawave Semi unveiled an industry-first live demo of its 24 Gbps UCIe silicon platform.
Mohit Gupta, Alphawave Semi’s SVP and GM of Custom Silicon and IP, highlighted the achievement, stating, “The successful tape-out of this off-the-shelf, multi-protocol I/O connectivity chiplet demonstrates our extensive experience using the TSMC 3DFabricTM ecosystem to integrate advanced interfaces. This marks another step forward in Alphawave Semi’s mission to deliver ultra-high-performance connectivity for the critical data communications that underpin the world’s digital infrastructure.” He further added that their top hyperscaler and datacentre infrastructure customers can now easily mix and match high-performance custom SoCs with Alphawave Semi’s I/O connectivity or memory expansion chiplets, offering a new level of flexibility and scalability for their AI-enabled systems.
Percy Chang, Director of Emerging Business Development at TSMC, commented on this milestone, “The tape-out of the Alphawave Semi multi-protocol I/O connectivity chiplet built on our 7nm process exemplifies TSMC’s critical role in the semiconductor platforms essential to new and emerging high-performance, high-throughput applications. We will continue to collaborate with our VCA partners like Alphawave Semi to foster a robust and open chiplet ecosystem that delivers the high-bandwidth connectivity and compute silicon needed for HPC and AI applications.”
Alphawave IP Group plc (LON:AWE) is a semiconductor IP company focused on providing DSP based, multi-standard connectivity Silicon IP solutions targeting both data processing in the Datacenter and data generation by IoT end devices.
