Singapore-based Silicon Box specializes in chiplets. Chiplets are an increasingly popular way to produce high-performance chips by tightly packing small chips and shortening electrical connections. To help scale production, the three-year-old startup recently raised $200 million in a Series B round from industry giants and billionaire co-founders.
as As tech giants battle to build ever-more powerful AI systems using smaller, faster chips, industry veterans including the billionaire husband-and-wife duo behind Nasdaq-listed Marvell Technologies One new unicorn startup co-founded by is using chiplet technology to accelerate the potential paradigm to move to bigger and faster chips.
To help mainstream chiplet technology, Singapore-based SiliconBox in January partnered with BRV Capital, the technology-focused growth equity arm of BlueRun Ventures, Event Horizon Capital, Maverick Capital, Prasedium Capital, TDK Ventures, the venture arm of Tokyo-based electronics giant TDK, and UMC Capital of Taiwan-based semiconductor manufacturer United Microelectronics.
Silicon Box chiplet package.
Silicon box provided
The round includes the startup’s three co-founders, billionaires Sehat Sutaja and Weili Dai (the couple who previously co-founded Marvell Technology), and a subsidiary of semiconductor testing and packaging giant JCET. Byung Jun Han, former CEO of Stats ChipPac, also participated. The Series B brings the three-year-old startup’s total funding to his $410 million and valuation of $1.08 billion, making it Singapore’s newest unicorn, a startup with a valuation of more than $1 billion. have become.
“Given the rise of AI and the huge demand, traditional monolithic integrated circuit design architectures are not sustainable,” Henry Huang, investment director at TDK Ventures, said in a video interview. “We need this chiplet concept to make chiplets more powerful and at a lower cost. [Silicon Box] It is clearly technically superior to many of its competitors. ”
To Mr. Huang, who received his Ph.D. In the field of electrical and computer engineering, silicon boxes are being used by advanced companies for chiplet manufacturing, such as billionaire Morris Chan’s Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which currently produces the majority of advanced chips. There is an opportunity to compete with existing large packaging companies. As a foundry, TSMC primarily makes chips for other companies that design them, including billionaire Lisa Su’s AMD and billionaire Jensen Huang’s Nvidia.
“We have to build chips differently…Each year, the cost of building a single-chip device increases exponentially rather than incrementally.”
“There are several people doing semiconductor packaging, but no one can do packaging like TSMC,” Huang adds. “When you look at Silicon Box, we think they are the only company that can do at least as good or similar to TSMC.”
The new funding will be used to support Silicon Box’s manufacturing capacity and global expansion. Last July, Silicon Box cut the ribbon on a 750,000 square foot semiconductor factory in Tampines, east of Singapore, which is home to several important industrial parks. Three months later, in October, his $2 billion facility began producing chiplets. Silicon Box declined to disclose its customers, but said its chiplets are used in hot AI areas such as large-scale language models, generative AI, high-performance computing, mobile computing, data centers, and electric vehicles. Ta.
A rendering of the Silicon Box production line in Singapore.
Silicon box provided
“We aim to be No. 1 and the most recognized company in the world in terms of technology and operational excellence,” Han, CEO of Silicon Box, said in a video interview. So far, the startup claims that its proprietary sub-5 micron technology can optimize power usage and reduce manufacturing costs by up to 90%.
For Han, the company also benefits from its location in Singapore, a geopolitically “neutral” location where the government is investing heavily in the semiconductor sector. “Singapore is a place that, if you look carefully, can attract global talent,” he added.
Silicon Box specializes in advanced packaging to produce chiplets, a type of chip that uses replaceable components as opposed to monolithic components. These interchangeable components can be tailored for specific functions and, like Lego pieces, can be added together to form a single unit. According to a report jointly released by BCG and the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association in November 2022, the process of combining specialized chiplet components, known as heterogeneous integration, is bringing “levels of integration that were previously impossible. It is said that it is possible to achieve “overall performance.”
Chiplet-based designs may also allow engineers to “be more creative” as an industry-wide race to increase the number of transistors that can fit on each chip faces new hurdles. Mr. Sutaja, chairman of Silicon Box, said:
“We need to build chips differently than we’ve ever done before,” he said in a separate video interview. “It may not be very obvious to people outside the industry…Each year, the cost of building a single-chip device increases exponentially rather than incrementally.”
Mr. Starja, an early pioneer of chiplet technology, says that initially there was “not a lot of urgency” for companies to look beyond monolithic chips. In 2015, Marvell Technology’s then CEO announced his vision for a modular chiplet-based design called “MoChi.” It is a combination of “modular” and “chip” reminiscent of the popular Japanese rice snack.
That idea never materialized. Widely considered expensive and too complex, MoChi and other modular designs remained unpopular. AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster voiced support, but Sutardja urged MoChi to be renamed “chiplet” (a long-standing industry term for isolated circuitry). encouraged. (“He asked, ‘What the hell is MoChi?’” Starja quips.)
Nearly a decade later, Sutardja’s vision has proven prescient as industry leaders rush to adopt chiplets. AMD announced its first chiplet-based design in 2015, and in 2021 it unveiled a 3D design tailored for high-performance computers. (Dai said Papermaster thanked Staja for spearheading MoChi.) In 2022, AMD, Arm, Intel and billionaire Jay Y. Lee’s Samsung A consortium of semiconductor giants has launched the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). An open source industry standard for chiplet manufacturing. Immediately after the release of UCIe, Marvel joined the coalition, followed by Nvidia. Last December, Intel unveiled its first fully chiplet-based design, after nearly a decade of refining similar designs.
“If you look at today’s chiplets from a design perspective, most companies are moving in that direction, but the bottleneck is the advanced packaging,” says Dai, who is based in Las Vegas with Sutardja. “So we’re here to help the industry grow faster.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su is holding a 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processor with a chiplet design.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Silicon Box says its competitors are primarily other outsourced semiconductor assembly and test vendors (OSATs) that help foundries package and test the chips they produce. Major OSATs include Taiwan-based billionaire Jason Chan’s ASE Technology and Arizona-based Nasdaq-listed Amkor Technology, while Silicon Box CEO Han said: Previously, he served as Director of Research and Development. TSMC in particular is a “natural collaborator,” SiliconBox said in an emailed statement.
“Foundries need us, too,” says Dye, who helped form key industry partnerships at Marvell. “We’re very neutral and can pull this together from multiple foundries.”
Still, chips face technical challenges as they scale up, a phenomenon widely known in the semiconductor industry as the “red brick wall.” The closer different components are on a circuit, the more heat these components generate and the more complex their operation becomes. For chiplets, where components of different shapes and functions are placed on the same base, these thermal issues can be a challenge, according to a paper on potential chiplet cooling systems presented at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ 2023 meeting. could be more pressing.
For the past two years, investors across Asia have been leveraging startups to capture the rapidly expanding AI chip market. Recent funding activity has been in South Korea, where in early February AI chip startup Rebellions announced it had raised $124 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the valuation to $650 million. did. Last November, MangoBoost, a chip design startup based in Seoul and Seattle, was named to last year’s Forbes list of Asia’s 100 Companies to Watch, a prominent company that has backed billionaire Beom Kim and others. The company raised $55 million in a Series A funding round led by leading investor IMM Investment. Crafton by Coupang and Jang Byung-gyu.
Despite naysayers and fierce competition across the industry, CEO Han says there are “not a lot of alternatives” to Silicon Box’s work. “We are trying to create a technology that is disruptive enough to serve any market.”
“I don’t usually try to convince skeptics,” Han added. “We’re just smiling.”
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