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.
CaMinoBW developed a rapid prototyping and simulation environment for exploring chiplet architectures. The “Chipletify” tool can be used to modularise monolithic system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures. Combined with the protocol-accurate implementation of the 'Bunch of Wires' specification, simulation models can be created to evaluate various chiplet architectures. Based on established generation methods for RISC-V systems, a comprehensive tool environment for exploring RISC-V chiplet architectures has been created.
The approach was demonstrated by an FPGA implementation of an AI for object recognition, which is executed with hardware acceleration on a modularized RISC-V system. CaMinoBW developed dedicated protocol converters that translate between on-chip and BoW interconnects. CaMinoBW thus demonstrates the path from application to exploration to chiplet architecture.
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.
