EMBEDDED SYSTEMS WEEK 2022

In this panel, we will discuss the “Promised Land” of waferscale computing. Back in the 1980s, waferscale systems were attempted by a few companies, notable amongst them were Trilogy systems and Tandem Computers. However, yield and cost challenges of building waferscale systems led to its early demise, but the promise remained. After more than 30 years, recent academic (e.g., UCLA/UIUC) and industrial (Cerebras, Tesla) efforts have taken up the challenge again. So, are we in a waferscale technology renaissance period and nearing the days when waferscale technologies would be widely adopted? Many questions remain which we will discuss in this panel.

First and foremost, is the overall technology there yet? Does manufacturing difficulties, more so in the advanced nodes, limit choice of waferscale architectures? Would waferscale integration of heterogeneous chiplets open up more architectural choices over monolithic waferscale technologies ? Waferscale computing comes with very high power density, which means 10s of kilowatts of power need to be supplied and that heat needs to be extracted from the wafer. Is the data center infrastructure ready to accommodate such waferscale systems at scale? Are there lower power use cases for Waferscale ? Moreover, the design infrastructure, such as EDA and simulation tools are not yet truly ready for larger-than-a-reticle design. Thus, the overall design challenges of a waferscale system is humongous and so would the development be confined to a niche group? What are the applications that need waferscale computing and would benefit massively from such systems? Does the cost of waferscale systems justify adoption of these systems at volume? Are there previously untenable applications and business cases that now become feasible with waferscale computing, if so what are those? Are there edge compute use cases where the volumetric compute density would lead to adoption of waferscale systems?