Chiplets on Wheels: Review Paper on Holistic Chiplet Solutions for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper reviews holistic chiplet solutions tailored for autonomous vehicles, addressing design challenges, proposing new architectures, and developing simulation tools to optimize performance and thermal management in automotive chip systems.

Contribution

It introduces a throughput-oriented micro-architecture for ADAS and infotainment, a novel evaluation methodology, and simulation tools for chiplet-based automotive chip design.

Findings

Proposed a throughput-oriented micro-architecture for automotive systems

Developed simulation tools based on gem5 for latency and throughput analysis

Designed thermally-aware chiplet placement and cooling solutions

Abstract

On the advent of the slow death of Moore's law, the silicon industry is moving towards a new era of chiplets. The automotive industry is experiencing a profound transformation towards software-defined vehicles, fueled by the surging demand for automotive compute chips, expected to reach 20-22 billion by 2030. High-performance compute (HPC) chips become instrumental in meeting the soaring demand for computational power. Various strategies, including centralized electrical and electronic architecture and the innovative Chiplet Systems, are under exploration. The latter, breaking down System-on-Chips (SoCs) into functional units, offers unparalleled customization and integration possibilities. The research accentuates the crucial open Chiplet ecosystem, fostering collaboration and enhancing supply chain resilience. In this paper, we address the unique challenges that arise when attempting to leverage chiplet-based architecture to design a holistic silicon solution for the automotive industry. We propose a throughput-oriented micro-architecture for ADAS and infotainment systems alongside a novel methodology to evaluate chiplet architectures. Further, we develop in-house simulation tools leveraging the gem5 framework to simulate latency and throughput. Finally, we perform an extensive design of thermally-aware chiplet placement and develop a micro-fluids-based cooling design.