Research Projects

CaMinoBW

Co-design for application-specific microelectronics with innovative chiplets in Baden-Württemberg

Start: 04.2025

End: 10.2025

The ever-increasing integration density of microchips is expanding the potential for implementing more and more comprehensive functions. However, SMEs can rarely cope with the constantly growing complexity and costs of chip design and manufacturing. Here, chiplets offer an innovative solution as they have the potential to enable application-specific microelectronics to be produced in small quantities.

The approach combines a complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) consisting of several smaller, separately manufactured functional units, known as chiplets, which communicate via a die-to-die (D2D) interconnect.

This increases the degree of reuse and allows the combination of different structural sizes. Chiplets originate in high-performance computing. Approaches for resource-constrained embedded systems are currently still largely unexplored and pose further challenges. An important aspect here is the early evaluation of the overall architecture, meaning the application-specific selection of chiplet modules and the implementation of the connection structure.

Role of the FZI

As part of CaMinoBW, the FZI Research Center for Information Technology is investigating tools and methods for designing chiplets. A central component is an integrated development and simulation environment that enables the modeling and evaluation of modular SoC architectures based on RISC-V in early design phases. The environment supports the synthesis of SoC designs for prototypical implementation on FPGAs, enabling the overall architecture to be evaluated in practice. In addition, the planned simulation environment allows targeted analysis of the interaction between the chiplets, including communication via D2D interconnects.

Contact

Dr. rer. nat. Sebastian Reiter

Department Manager

Division: Intelligent Systems and Production Engineering

Research Focus

Sustainable Engineering and Energy

This research focus includes the research and design of sustainable IT innovations in the cross-sectional areas of energy, mobility, production, water management, and logistics. This involves developing systems that promote the ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable use of resources, and providing strategic consultancy services to companies, particularly SMEs, on their path to greater sustainability.