Tech war: is the ‘chiplet’ a short cut for China to address its semiconductor self-sufficiency or a wrong turn?
- The chiplet has gained popularity in China as the country’s semiconductor industry is years, if not decades, behind international fabs such as TSMC
- However, some experts say the chiplet is ‘complementary’ to advanced chipmaking technology, and not a replacement for it
Amid no letup in US-China tech tensions, many industry professionals are pinning their hopes on the concept of a chiplet as a replacement for standard chips to help the country achieve greater self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacturing.
The chiplet is essentially a technology that allows an integrated circuit (IC) block to be interconnected with other ICs to form a larger, more complex chip.
The chiplet has gained popularity in China as the country’s semiconductor manufacturing is years, if not decades, behind international fabs such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics when it comes to making advanced chips.
With US trade sanctions on the export of advanced chip technologies to China unlikely to lift any time soon, a number of Chinese researchers have argued that the chiplet could be an option for the country to forge its own path in advanced chipmaking.
Huawei Technologies Co, the Chinese telecoms giant under strict US sanctions, is looking at innovation in chip packaging – a technology related to the chiplet – in a bid to solve its own chip sourcing problem.