Intel joined the CHIPS Alliance and gave the world the Advanced Interface Bus

Open standards are gaining more and more supporters. The giants of the IT market are forced not only to reckon with this phenomenon, but also to give their unique developments to open communities. A recent example is the transfer of the Intel AIB bus to the CHIPS Alliance.

This week, Intel became a member of the CHIPS Alliance (Common Hardware for Interfaces, Processors and Systems). As the acronym CHIPS implies, this industry consortium is working to develop a range of open solutions for SoCs and high-density chip packages, such as SiP (system-in-packages).

Becoming a member of the alliance, Intel donated a bus created in its bowels to the community Advanced Interface Bus (AIB). Of course, not out of pure altruism: although the AIB bus will allow everyone to create efficient inter-chip interfaces without paying royalties to Intel, the company also expects to increase the popularity of its own chiplets.

The AIB bus is being developed by Intel under the DARPA program. The US military has long been interested in highly integrated, multi-chip logic. The company introduced the first generation of the AIB tire in 2017. The exchange rate then reached 2 Gb / s over a single line. The second generation of the AIB tire was introduced last year. The exchange rate increased to 5,4 Gbps. In addition, the AIB bus offers the industry's best bit rate per mm: 200 Gbps. For multichip packages, this is the most important parameter.

It is important to note that the AIB tire is indifferent to the manufacturing process and packaging method. It can be implemented in either Intel EMIB Spatial Multi-Chip packaging, TSMC's unique CoWoS packaging, or another company's packaging. The flexibility of the interface will serve open standards well.

At the same time, it should be recalled that another open community - the Open Compute Project - is also developing its own bus for connecting chiplets (crystals). This is an Open Domain-Specific Architecture bus (ODSA). The working group to create ODSA is relatively recent, so Intel's entry into the CHIPS Alliance and the transfer of the AIB bus to the community may be a game of pre-emption.

Source: 3dnews.ru