M+E Connections

There has been increased interest in chiplet-based System on a Chip (SoC) architectures over the past three years, and they were recently made a focus of the federal CHIPS and Science Act to reduce the cost of innovation for U.S.-based semiconductor startups, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) projects and academic research, according to Perforce Software.

But chiplet-based architectures bring their own set of challenges, especially in the context of IP security, Simon Butler, general manager of Perforce’s Methodics business, said Aug. 23, during the webinar “IP Lifecycle Management for Chiplet-Based SoCs.”

Butler was the founder and CEO of Methodics, acquired by Perforce in 2020. Methodics created IP Lifecycle Management (IPLM) as a new business segment in the enterprise software sector to service the needs of IP and component-based design.

Today, Methodics IPLM tracks IP and its metadata across projects, providing end-to-end traceability, according to Perforce. Teams can, as a result, browse an enterprise-wide IP catalog, while keeping it secure, “preventing leakage,” Perforce says at its website.

Viewers of the webinar were able to learn best practices for managing IPs from inception through SoC integration, including: ensuring end-to-end traceability, managing security concerns, and “enforcing IP provenance,” according to the company.

“Just as a quick background, there’s been some pretty seismic events in the last year or two,” Butler said at the start of the webinar.

One of those major events was the Chips and Science Act, he said, referring to the U.S. federal statute enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Aug. 9, 2022. The act provided about $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S.

The act was a “reaction to” Asia and Eastern Europe gaining manufacturing strength at the expense of the U.S. in recent years, and the desire by the U.S. government to bring some of that manufacturing, capacity and skills back to the U.S., said Butler.

Also, the U.S. Department of Defense was looking to have a trusted source of silicon for its projects, he said.

Chiplets, tiny integrated circuits (ICs) containing a subset of functionality, were singled out as “one way to reduce the cost of innovation,” he said. “And that’s something that we’ve all been struggling with,” he noted, pointing to how hard it has become to create a startup now  in the semiconductor space.

Chiplets, in theory, can reduce the cost of those short runs and spur some innovation,” he said.

But chiplets “require some different infrastructure,” he pointed out. “There’s some packaging challenges, verification challenges, some providence challenges.”

Chiplets have “been around a while,” and were first developed in the early 2000s, “but we haven’t really seen a lot at traction [because] it was quite exotic and expensive,” he noted.

But he added: “Recently, there’s been more interest because the cost of manufacturing has really gone up.” Therefore, it’s become “quite an interesting option for reducing cost and making it a little easier to put together the different IPs we need for our designs,” he said.

However, “there’s some new problems, of course,” he noted. As examples, he said: “As always, now we need a different set of interconnect models [and] the time of verification is a lot more complex. And there’s a lot of concern around how we trust [the ways] these Ips are delivered and integrated.”