New Standard Will Enable Modular Chips

A number of leading companies in the semiconductor industry have created a new standard for connecting multiple "chiplets" with different functions into one system-on-chip (SoC) package. This will enable a modular approach to designing the main chips that power phones and other devices. Chiplets conforming to the standard could be mixed and matched from different manufacturers and more easily combined into a custom SoC. The standard is called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) and it's backed by most of the major companies involved in making SoCs for phones. That includes Arm, which designs that cores on which most modern SoCs are based. It also includes Arm's main customers like Qualcomm and Samsung. It further includes all of the top chip manufacturers such as TMSC, Samsung, and Intel. Intel is contributing most of the key technology on which UCIe is based, which is partly related to the PCIe standard.