Chip designers, suppliers, makers, and hyperscale users have combined to form a chiplet consortium.

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium will establish a die-to-die interconnect standard and "foster an open chiplet ecosystem."

Chiplets are a growing concept in the semiconductor design industry, where tiny dies are used instead of one monolithic die.

This has so far been used to split CPUs into several pieces (in the extreme, Intel Ponte Vecchio includes 47 chiplets on a single package). But with interoperability, one could build chips that mix-and-match chiplets from different companies.

Intel and AMD previously trialed this with the ‘Intel 8th Generation Core with Radeon RX Vega M Graphics' chip that included an ‘H-series’ Intel central processor and an AMD Radeon graphics processor as two chiplets on the same package, but true interoperability has been lacking.

UCIe aims to solve that - at least for the companies that have joined.

The consortium launches with founding members Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (ASE), AMD, Arm, Google Cloud, Intel Corporation, Meta, Microsoft Corporation, Qualcomm Incorporated, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Nvidia and Amazon Web Services are currently not members.

The members ratified the UCIe specification, an open industry standard developed to establish a ubiquitous interconnect at the package level. The UCIe 1.0 specification covers the die-to-die I/O physical layer, die-to-die protocols, and software stack which leverage PCI Express and Compute Express Link standards.

“Integrating multiple chiplets in a package to deliver product innovation across market segments is the future of the semiconductor industry and a pillar of Intel’s IDM 2.0 strategy," Sandra Rivera, Intel VP and GM of its data center & AI division, said.

Vijay Rao, director of technology and strategy at Meta (previously Facebook), said: "Meta initiated ecosystem development to promote chiplet-based SOCs via the Open Compute Project (OCP) and is pleased to collaborate with other industry leaders via UCIe consortium for the ongoing and future success in this area.”