edfas.org ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS | VOLUME 27 NO. 4 2 The semiconductor industry is at a pivotal inflection point. As traditional transistor scaling slows and Moore’s Law faces economic and physical headwinds to enable next generation AI architectures, chiplets and heterogeneous integration technologies, including advanced packaging, have emerged as a foundational strategy for sustaining the growth of datacenter and edge AI applications. These modular designs are not just a workaround, they represent a paradigm shift in how we architect, manufacture, and scale silicon systems for AI enablement. Chiplets enable heterogeneous integration, allowing specialized dies— compute, memory, I/O—to be combined into a unified system. This modularity enhances design flexibility, improves yield, and accelerates innovation cycles. At AMD, we’ve seen firsthand how chiplet-based systems can meet the surging demand for compute, which is almost doubling every year—outpacing the transistor density gains of Moore’s Law. It’s also allowing us to build next generation AI architectures not feasible with monolithic silicon. Yield dynamics also favor chiplets. Splitting a monolithic system on chip (SOC) into smaller dies improves wafer utilization and allows selective binning for performance tiers. This flexibility enables AMD to address diverse markets—from consumer desktops to data center accelerators—with tailored configurations. Central to this evolution is the convergence of system architecture and advanced packaging. Technologies such as 2.5D and 3D hybrid bonding are key architectural enablers. For example, AMD’s 3D V-Cache uses hybrid bonding to stack a 64 MB cache chiplet directly atop a 32 MB L3 cache, tripling capacity with minimal latency overhead. This innovation delivers up to 15% faster gaming performance and three times the L3 cache in server implementations, dramatically improving application throughput. The elevated fan-out bridge (EFB) architecture, introduced in AMD’s MI200 GPU, exemplifies how advanced packaging innovation drives perfor- mance. By elevating the silicon bridge die within the copper pillar shadow, AMD achieved better electrical behavior and manufacturability—critical for deploying tens of thousands of units in systems like the Frontier supercomputer. The pinnacle of this was our introduction of the 3.5D architecture combining best-in-class 3D hybrid bonding and 2.5D architectures as demonstrated in high volume with the MI300/MI355 AI accelerators, and will take a leap with the MI450 family. Looking ahead, 3D stacking will unlock new architectural possibilities: IP-on-IP stacking, macro-level slicing, and circuit-level integration. These innovations will enable beyond-Moore scaling and heterogeneous systems that were previously only feasible in supercomputers. But to realize this vision, NOVEMBER 2025 | VOLUME 27 | ISSUE 4 A RESOURCE FOR TECHNICAL INFORMATION AND INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENTS ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS GUEST EDITORIAL CHIPLET ARCHITECTURES: ENABLING SCALABLE INTEGRATION FOR THE AI ERA Raja Swaminathan, AMD raja.swaminathan@amd.com edfas.org (continued on page 47) PURPOSE: To provide a technical condensation of information of interest to electronic device failure analysis technicians, engineers, and managers. Nicholas Antoniou Editor/KLA nicholas.antoniou@kla.com Joanne Miller Senior Editor Victoria Burt Managing Editor Allison Freeman Production Supervisor ASSOCIATE EDITORS Navid Asadi University of Florida Guillaume Bascoul CNES France Felix Beaudoin GlobalFoundries Michael R. Bruce Consultant Jiann Min Chin Advanced Micro Devices Singapore Michael DiBattista Varioscale Inc. Rosine Coq Germanicus Universitié de Caen Normandie Szu Huat Goh Qualcomm Jason Holm NIST Ted Kolasa Northrop Grumman Space Systems Joy Liao Nvidia Corp. Rosalinda M. Ring NenoVision Tom Schamp E-Space David Su Yi-Xiang Investment Co. Martin Versen University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim, Germany FOUNDING EDITORS Edward I. Cole, Jr. Sandia National Labs Lawrence C. Wagner LWSN Consulting Inc. GRAPHIC DESIGN Jan Nejedlik, jan@designbyj.com PRESS RELEASE SUBMISSIONS magazines@asminternational.org Electronic Device Failure Analysis™ (ISSN 1537-0755) is published quarterly by ASM International®, 9639 Kinsman Road, Materials Park, OH 44073; tel: 800.336.5152; website: edfas. org. Copyright © 2025 by ASM International. Receive Electronic Device Failure Analysis as part of your EDFAS membership. Non-member subscription rate is $175 U.S. per year. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by ASM International for libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service, provided that the base fee of $19 per article is paid directly to CCC, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Electronic Device Failure Analysis is indexed or abstracted by Compendex, EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest. Swaminathan
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