As Moore’s Law rears its ugly head, computer chip developers are adopting the “chiplet” architecture to measure hardware processing power. Chiplets are Lego-like integrated circuit blocks designed to work with others, with the same physical footprint, to create performance-enhancing, complex and stackable chips. Chiplets offer several advantages over conventional designs. But assembly issues — as well as challenges in balancing cost, performance, power consumption and time to market — often plague them in the early stages.
Aiming to overcome the obstacles in chiplet creation, Ramin Fajadrad, Sirus Ziaei and Patrick Soheili founded Elian, a chiplet networking startup, in 2021. – Performance and more energy efficient chips.
“The focus is on developing a way to create more high-performance, low-power, low-latency connections for chiplet architectures, which experts agree is the only way to sustain Moore’s Law,” Farjadrad told TechCrunch in an email interview. . “We use our technologies in standard packaging, thus saving time, cost and development effort compared to the advanced packaging required by other communication schemes. In addition, our approach has the long-term benefits of reducing material costs and waste in the manufacturing process, and reducing power consumption for high-performance computer chips.”
Marvel’s Alien Origins It is in Aquantia, a startup he acquired in 2019. He co-founded Aquantian and served as the startup’s chief engineer for nearly 15 years. Prior to Elia, Farjadrad spent several years at Marvell as CTO and VP of the company’s Network and Automotive division. Ziai is a former VP of engineering at Qualcomm, while Soheili was previously VP of business development at semiconductor firm eSilicon.
While Elian has yet to commercialize the technology — it expects the first silicon to be on the market in Q2 2023 — the company says it has reached the final stage before manufacturing the tape using semiconductor manufacturer TSMC’s 5 nm process. In chip lingo, “process” refers to the building platform; TSMC will begin mass production of 5 nm chips in 2020.
“Elian’s technology allows processors to scale their performance and make their power more readily available and productive,” said Farjadrad. “The world is always in need of more computing power, and Elia is delivering a critical aspect of ensuring scalability for any type of high-performance computing application.”
The fact that Elian’s technology is not yet on the market may give some potential customers pause. But the startup has notable investors, including Intel and Micron, along with Cerberus and Celestra for Elian’s $40 million Series A tranche that closed today.
Elia plans to continue with the capital chase In the year After the chiplet market, which could reach $50 billion by 2024 – especially by increasing testing and implementation. Farjadrad wouldn’t name its customers, but said Elian, which currently has a staff of 21, is in talks with “large semiconductor companies, hyperscalers and AI processor startups.”
“We’re tackling the challenges and realities of physics by designing and manufacturing advanced chips… [but we’re] In a high-demand market.” Farjadrad said. “Our technology will ultimately lead to faster, more efficient and cheaper high-performance computing for data centers, cloud computing, AI, graphics and more.”
