In The Arena by TechArena - Charting Architectural Innovation in the Chiplet Era with OCP's Cliff Grossner

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with OCP’s Cliff Grossner regarding the chiplet era, how architectural evolution has evolved to a chiplet economy, and how the OCP is helping create an open marketplace for innovation.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Allison Klein, and today I am so delighted to have Cliff Groszner, Chief Innovation Officer of the Open Compute Project Foundation, back in the studio with me. Welcome, Cliff. Hey, Allison. Good to talk to you again. Why don't you just start, Cliff, by giving us a summary of what does it mean to be the chief innovation officer of the Open Compute Foundation, and how does that relate to the broader purview of OCP? Well, thank you, Allison. You're right.

That is a good question. Some of the top things that I'm responsible for is working with the foundation staff and the board of directors of the OCP to help set strategy for the foundation around what projects we want to invest in, what are the upcoming innovation areas that we might need to build competencies in that we don't have. And also very importantly, I work very closely in crafting and carrying out our startup initiatives, working with our startup members and our startup program participants, really helping them on their journey from innovation to commercialization. The other thing that I do at the OCP is work a lot with our alliance partners, establishing and maintaining the relationships. And of course, I must also mention that I do work with some of the project leadership

very closely at OCP, certainly on projects that we consider very strategic, such as the one I think we're talking about today, which is the Open Domain Specific Architecture Project at the Open domain project that books on chiplets. Yeah. And, you know, I'm glad that you mentioned that because the chiplet summit is coming this week and we have all of the industry leaders across Silicon and Foundry gathered to discuss chiplets. Let's just ground on chiplets for a second. You know, I know HostCP

is deeply involved here. Why does this alternative architecture make sense? And how did we get to a moment where chiplets were the prioritized architectural framework for CPUs, GPUs, any logic that's going into systems today? Yeah, Alison, that's a great question. And I think to answer it, we just need to step back to January 2023, about a year ago, when the first Chiplet Summit was held and the Open Compute Project launched its Open Chiplet Economy Vision. there was a change coming towards us in terms of the introduction of the next wave of AI and also needs of high-performance compute, which have always been there but continue to get more and more. And in order to meet the requirements for these key elements, the idea of a domain-specific silicon architecture was required where we could tailor the computational capabilities of particular chips to the workload. And that was going to be required to meet the challenges for performance for these domains. On top of that, the other thing that was happening at the same time, two forces coming together, if you like, was that the ability for us to continue to create chips that increased in

performance at the same rate no longer existed. And so we moved to a new process node. We'd incur more cost. We'd face lower yields. And we could not reuse circuitry from one generation to another across process nodes. And we realized that we had to do something different. And that's where the concept of a chiplet was born, where we could now mix and match potentially chips or chiplets from different process node sizes and reuse things between generations. And also lower costs and increase yields for certain key components that are going into silicon and ending up in what we call systemate package

when we use chiplets. There is one other thing that I also wanted to mention to keep in everybody's mind. You did say, very rightfully so, that the first market segment to bite off chiplets is the data center and for high-performance computing AI. But we believe that one day chiplets will be everywhere in all market segments and they will continue to move out from that one beachhead

into the rest of the market because it just makes sense. Now, OCP has a priority for open hardware frameworks for infrastructure. And obviously, industry standards is part of that. UCIE is obviously a force within the chiplet arena. It was announced back in November of 2022.

Where do you see the difference being in terms of having an industry standard in play on opening up design? Well, with the OpenChiplet economy vision that we launched last year, we recognized that standards were going to play a very important part of OpenPool this month. And those could be standards for various reasons. They could be tools that are based upon standard specifications and designs and use cases, and also platforms that could be tools that are based upon standard specifications and designs and use cases,

and also platforms that could be shared in a pre-competitive environment. And within the open chiplet economy, we work on all of those concepts. We work on how does the new workflow for the supply chain on the technical side with chiplets, how is that going to evolve? Because we're no longer in a situation where one company is doing the development in-house and there are unspoken design rules and best practices that exist within a particular company that won't exist when you have a workflow where chiplets are sourced on the open market and integrated by a third party.

Quite a different environment. On top of that, there's the business workflows. What are the standardized contracts and rules of engagement for chiplet vendors and chiplet purchasers that are then going to package them into a chiplet? Of course, we also look at chiplet interconnect standards as well because they're very important. But they're one of the many types of work that we do within the open chiplet economy. And we believe that we will march towards a open marketplace. When you consider that all the major logic players have embraced chiplet designs within

their own packages, do you have a perspective on what we're seeing in terms of agility for solution delivery since this move? Well, you know, we have specific examples of the advantages that a particular company can have in the market when they embrace chiplets in their own in-house designs. And they're evident in the market. However, we think that's just the tip of the iceberg. That at the Open Compute Project, we believe that innovation happens when we enable some of the smaller players.

And I said smaller, not really small, but smaller players, to be able to be engaged in developing specialized E6. And for that to happen, the next step would be to open up the supply chain. And that means that we have a market where we have commercially viable standalone chiplets, something we don't have yet today, but what we believe is going to be necessary. At OCP, as we mentioned, you work on hardware standard specs. What is the organization doing in terms of chiplets? You mentioned an initiative earlier in the conversation,

but can you unpack that a little bit and see how that will help focus industry development in 2024? Well, since we launched the open chiplet economy vision associated with our open domain specific architecture project at OCP, we've seen a lot of progress in 2023. The one that we're very excited about is that we already have many commercial products by newer players available in the market. Secondly, we already have an alliance with Jetta, where work done at the OCP has seeded a new standard for chiplet description language that will be instrumental in enabling an open chiplet marketplace, like I talked about earlier, as now we'll have an electronic way that's standardized for a chiplet vendor to share with a chiplet purchaser

the details of the chiplet that they're purchasing so they can use that with their EDA design when they actually integrate chiplets into a package. And the standard I'm referring to is the JETA JEP30 standard, that we work very closely with that. And you asked about 2024. Well, that work is not finished. Moving on from a chiplet description schema,

or language as I refer to it, we're now working on chiplet design kits, so a standard way to look at chiplet design that can be used by system-in-package developers who are taking chiplets and putting them into a path. Some of the other things that we're very excited about for 2024 is we believe that we're in the process of looking at modular form fact,

which will be able to help speed the integration of chiplets into a package because they'll have standardized form fact. Well, I'm going to start that again. I'm going to start just this piece again. Okay. So looking forward, another thing we're very excited about for 2024 is the concept of modular form fact, which we've been working on for a little while now.

The idea here is that we create three or four standardized form factors where many of the design decisions are common, which means that those chiplets can be speedily integrated into a system and package. And that will help accelerate the market. Some of the innovations you can look forward from us and the OCP projects in 2024. Fantastic. Now, you count some of the world's largest data center operators on the planet as your members. Do they envision a world of composable silicon with best-in-breed chiplets? And do you see them driving more to custom silicon development of their own or working with best-in-breed providers of chiplets to deliver solutions? I can't speak for the plans of our members. However, I do at the foundation, we have a vision, which is supported by our membership, around composable silicon using customized chiplets.

And we all agree that this is the way we need to move forward to meet the requirements of AI and ML and also high-performance computing. Now, OCP has its own event coming up, the Regional Summit coming up in Lisbon. This is exciting to me. I was in Prague last year for the Regional Summit, and it was a terrific event, not only to see what was going on with OCP and membership, but to reach out to a whole new realm of innovators coming from Europe. Can you tell us a little bit about what's happening at the summit? Will chiplets be a focus? Are there other topics that you're excited about heading into this event? Yeah, thank you, Alison. That's exciting. I'm glad you could make it to the last regional summit. Last regional summit, we had about 650 folks that came out for the two days, and about 65% of the attendees were from Europe. This year, we're hoping to be bigger. We're targeting 800 people, and it's very important for us that when we go to a region like the MEA that we work to bring topics to the event that are specific to the region.

And so certainly Chiplets will be part of the discussion, and we hope to have a breakout session on chiplets. AI, security and data protection, power and cooling, scalable compute infrastructures, and E communications and computing, one on telecommunications focused on Open RAN, and a third one on optics focused on probably AI network. So that is a lineup that we're hoping to have in April. That's April 24th and 25th in Lisbon. And I'm hoping to have, because the call for papers closes on Monday. So if anybody hears this and wants to put in a proposal

for a presentation over the weekend, it's not too late or even on Monday. And it'll get evaluated with all the rest. And we're always dependent upon those proposals to get the best content. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing those details. One final question for you, Cliff.

While we're talking, where can folks find out more about OCP, register for the summit, and perhaps get involved in some of the work groups and other initiatives that are going on with membership? Well, the first place to start is always the OCP website. There are tabs that outline the projects. There's also another tab that outlines the coming events. And you'll find both the OCP regional that's going on in April and the global summit that's in October in San Jose. If it's not too late, you can still find on our blog page the description of the Chiplet Summit tutorial

that the OCP is sponsoring. That tutorial is going to take place on Tuesday, February the 6th from 1 to 5 in the afternoon. And we have quite a generous lineup of people coming to talk. And I can tell you that we already have near 200 people that have registered for our tutorial. That's wonderful. So please go to the website. You can take a look at the description.

And we're happy to have more than 200. We have a big room. So we have lots of room for people to come and join us. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I know it's precious. I would love to have you back on the show soon. Well, thank you, Allison.

That's great, and I look forward to it. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.