Anyone in our industry who doesn’t believe system scaling is an industry movement need look no further than the IoT market of high-volume and low-cost devices. While these devices have exacting densities, performance and power requirements, advanced process technologies are a bit too risky and costly for IoT developers. IoT also requires heterogeneous functions such as digital, analog, mixed-signal, sensors and MEMS, a challenging proposition to mix all of these capabilities on a single die/process.

And, system scaling –– or multi-die IC –– is a viable integration alternative to traditional transistor scaling of newer process technologies. It integrates complex systems at the functional/building block level, not the transistor level. It doesn’t replace the need for the SoC. Instead, the SoC remains a key functional component of the system or, in die-form, a key building block of a multi-die IC.  System scaling relies on different advanced packaging technologies used to integrate and package multiple heterogeneous die.
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