A 7-nm 4-GHz Arm 1-Core-Based CoWoS1 Chiplet Design for High-Performance Computing Mu-Shan Lin , Tze-Chiang Huang, Chien-Chun Tsai, King-Ho Tam, Kenny Cheng-Hsiang Hsieh, Ching-Fang Chen, Wen-Hung Huang, Chi-Wei Hu, Y u-Chi Chen, Sandeep

Abstract

We present a dual-chiplet interposer-based system-in-package (SiP) octo-core processor using Chip-on- Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) technology. Each of the two identical chiplets is implemented in 7-nm CMOS with 15 metal layers and has four Arm Cortex-A72 processor cores operating at 4.0 GHz. A bidirectional mesh bus with 2-mm flop-to-flop distance is distributed throughout the chiplet for high-speed on-die data transport above 4.0 GHz. The chiplets communicate with each other through ultrashort reach (0.5 mm long) interposer channels using a Low-voltage-In- Package-INterCONnect (LIPINCON) clock-forwarded parallel interface. The scalable link module offers 320 GB/s of aggregate bandwidth, operating at 8.0 Gb/s/pin and 0.3-V transmitter swing without receiver termination to achieve 0.56-pJ/bit energy efficiency and 1.6-Tb/s/mm 2 bandwidth density. Measurements of the fabricated SiP validate the functionality and performance of the cores, on-die data bus, and inter-chiplet link. The built-in LIPINCON eye-scan feature validates inter-chiplet connectivity at 8.0 Gb/s with an eye opening of 244 mV and 0.69 UI.