High‑Performance Chiplet and Interconnect Architectures: Insights from the HiPChips Workshop at ISCA 2022

The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 2022 in New York hosted the inaugural HiPChips workshop, organized by Alibaba Cloud’s heterogeneous computing team, University of Washington, and the Open Compute Project, to explore the impact of chiplet and interconnect technologies on future computing architectures.

Prominent participants from Google, Meta, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ETH Zurich, UIUC, UCLA, Georgia Tech, and IIT Bombay presented on topics ranging from chiplet architecture, chip design, to interconnect standardization.

Chiplet adoption is driven by the limits of Moore’s law, rising manufacturing costs, and physical wafer constraints; partitioning wafers into smaller chips improves yield, enables heterogeneous integration, and offers flexible, scalable performance.

Key research highlights included UIUC’s wafer‑level chiplet processor integrating 40 GPUs with >5× performance improvement, Intel’s optical compute interconnect (OCI) delivering 1 Tbps per fiber and reduced energy/latency, and ASU’s in‑memory compute architecture achieving up to 10× performance for DNN models.

Advances in EDA automation for protocols such as BoW, OHBI, Ultra‑Link, and UCIe, 5.5D glass interposer integration, and JITX’s Chisel‑based system design tools were also showcased.

Standardization efforts were highlighted by Google’s Universal Chiplet Solution and ODSA’s BOW and UCIe initiatives, aiming to create interoperable data‑plane and control‑plane specifications.

On the software side, Alibaba Cloud presented the HALO/ODLA platform to enable lightweight, scalable heterogeneous computing frameworks with near‑zero inter‑chip latency.

Environmental considerations were addressed through Meta’s chiplet‑based carbon‑footprint assessment model and discussions on sustainable data‑center designs.

The workshop concluded that chiplet technology is a major trend shaping future computer architecture, offering performance, power, scalability, and sustainability benefits, and that continued collaboration between industry and academia is essential to build a unified ecosystem.