siliconindia

Chiplets, tiny integrated circuits containing a welldefined set of functionality, are gaining traction in the semiconductor industry. The primary advantages of adopting chiplets are improved design flexibility, significant time-to-market benefits, much lower development costs and better unit economics.

Ventana Micro Systems is paving the way for adopting chiplets by developing high-performance RISC-V CPU cores and other chiplet technologies. Ventana’s RISC-V CPUs provide best-in-class single-threaded performance for data center, cloud, enterprise, 5G, edge, and automotive applications.

Founded by semiconductor industry veterans, Balaji Baktha, CEO, and Greg Favor, CTO, Ventana Micro Systems focuses on demonstrating how RISC-V-based chiplets address high-performance computing challenges in data centers, automotive, 5G, and clients. Its driving determinant is creating high performance RISC-V CPUs based on upon the RISC-V open standard.

The ability to add custom extensions to the architecture enables hardware and software co-design to overcome the limitation posed by the flattening of Moore's law.

Architectural innovations allow customers to optimize their CPU subsystem based on cloud and other high-performance workloads. It also brings in workload-specific acceleration native to the CPU. "The approach toward hardware-software co-design enabled by RISC-V architecture enhances the performance by thirty to seventy percent," says Baktha.

Ventana plans to offer customized chips that will enable hyperscalers to achieve rapid productization while innovating and differentiating. The hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can buy chiplets from Ventana and use them as building blocks per their required use cases. This modular design approach allows them to create optimized server class processors at a fraction of the cost and less than half the time to build the complex SoCs. It has partnered with a large OEM to get its product definition and implementation methodology in place.

Currently, Ventana has at least a two year lead among competitors in the semiconductor industry. It is also gaining momentum with design wins and customer traction. Regarding market growth, there is an increasing demand for Ventana's solution in hyperscalers, particularly in China and the U.S. Meanwhile, there is significant interest for RISC–V chiplets in high-performance computing in Europe.

The approach toward hardware-software codesign enabled by RISC-V architecture enhances the performance by thirty to seventy percent

Moving ahead, it is developing chiplets for specific use cases in the automotive industry. The new-age automotive machines are fairly sophisticated computers on wheels that need to process unstructured data like images and make swift course corrections.