On January 9, 2024, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that it has successfully developed a super chip called "Zhejiang", which is the world's first chip using wafer-level integration technology, breaking the area limitation of lithography machines and achieving the perfect combination of high performance, low power consumption and high reliability.
The "Zhejiang" chip adopts an innovative chiplet design, consisting of 16 independent chiplets (chips), each of which integrates 16 cores based on the open-source RISC-V architecture, for a total of 256 cores, all of which support programmable and reconfigurable functions. The different cores are separated by advanced intercore networks and 25D interposer packaging technology enables high-speed, low-latency interconnects, forming a wafer-level chip system.
The biggest feature of the "Zhejiang" chip is that it is not limited by the area of the lithography machine, can occupy a total area of thousands of square millimeters, and integrates more than one trillion transistors, which is equivalent to more than ten times the number of transistors integrated on a single chip under the most advanced 5nm process. Moreover, its process is only 22nm, which is much lower in cost and power consumption than the 5nm process, but the performance is not inferior, or even higher.
Another advantage of the "Zhejiang" chip is that it has strong scalability, which can increase or decrease the number of cores according to different application needs, and can even reach 100 cores, so as to achieve a super chip with 1600 cores. This design can meet the needs of various high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, Internet of Things and other fields, and has broad market prospects.
Researchers from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that this achievement is a major breakthrough after years of research and innovation with the support of the national key research and development program. They also said that this wafer-level chip technology is a new development trend in the field of chip manufacturing, which will have a far-reaching impact on the international chip industry and enhance China's international competitiveness and voice in the chip field. I'm a tech creator