By Nir Sever, Senior Director of Business Development, proteanTecs
UCIe™ Consortium member proteanTecs shared details on its contribution to the development of the UCIe™ (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™) standard, the future of chiplet adoption in the automotive industry, and the importance of in-field lane monitoring and redundancy capabilities in the UCIe 1.1 specification.
Can you share a brief introduction of proteanTecs?
proteanTecs is a leading provider of deep data analytics for advanced electronics monitoring. Trusted by global leaders in the datacenter, automotive, communications and mobile markets, we provide system health and performance monitoring, from production to the field. By applying machine learning to novel data created by on-chip monitors, our analytics software solutions deliver unparalleled visibility and actionable insights—leading to new levels of performance, quality and reliability.
What prompted proteanTecs to join UCIe Consortium?
proteanTecs joined the UCIe Consortium in mid-2022—a couple of months after the Consortium officially launched. When we saw the early success of UCIe in uniting industry leaders and the shared vision, we knew we needed to be a part of it. We wholeheartedly agree with UCIe Consortium’s focus on building a vibrant chiplet ecosystem, ensuring compliance and interoperability.
What is the importance of a chiplet ecosystem to proteanTecs?
As we all understand, chiplets are the future. One projection estimates the chiplet market will reach an astonishing $57 billion in revenue by 2035. Advanced heterogeneous packaging is transforming the way leading-edge systems on a chip (SoCs) are developed, and proteanTecs is well-positioned to support this growing ecosystem with our die-to-die interconnect monitoring solution. Like any emerging technology, there are challenges that need to be addressed and overcome to achieve widespread commercialization and a healthy scale. This requires openness and collaboration amongst the ecosystem.
How does proteanTecs contribute/plan to contribute the Consortium?
As a Contributor member, the proteanTecs team is actively involved in several workgroups. We bring a unique perspective focused on quality and reliability into the issues inherent in high-performance interfaces.
Chiplets must be designed with testability and functional performance in mind, especially when considering the high costs and limitations of existing methods. proteanTecs’ approach uses on-chip interconnect agents, coupled with deep data analytics, to address several challenges and constraints of testing and monitoring chiplet-based systems.
Mission-critical systems, especially related to functional safety, such as automotive, need to assure the reliability and safety of the system is maintained throughout its lifetime. We are collaborating with the leading automotive OEMs and Tier 1s to add these capabilities into the standard, so that it can be adopted by the automotive industry.
Can you share some UCIe technology use cases that proteanTecs is bringing/will bring to the industry? Are there any specific market segments that will benefit most from UCIe?
proteanTecs’ 2.5D interconnect monitoring solution offers comprehensive visibility into high bandwidth die-to-die interfaces. As the industry adopts heterogeneous systems, the testing of inter-die links is critical. Traditional approaches rely on low-granularity, pass-fail testing, and offer limited monitoring during field operation. Addressing this challenge, proteanTecs’ patented solution delivers parametric lane grading with 100-percent lane and pin coverage, at test and in mission-mode. Customers can find marginal lanes during final testing and enhance their chip with reliability monitoring in the field and in mission, for early alerting of degrading lanes and redundant lane swapping.
Figure 1 - While best known methods (BKM) are limited to pass-fail testing, proteanTecs offers parametric lane grading with 100% lane and pin coverage.
One of our customers, Global Unichip Corp (GUC), a global provider of advanced IP and ASIC services, integrated our monitoring system into their 5nm chip to test and characterize the PHY signal integrity. This gave GUC a detailed view of the behavior of their interconnects under various operating conditions, allowing them to optimize their designs and improve their performance and reliability while lowering costs. We published a white paper with GUC that featured several key post-silicon findings, including how parametric lane grading and outlier detection algorithms were used to identify underperforming lanes.
Continuous performance and health monitoring based on in-chip monitors and analytics enables lane degradation monitoring, time-to-failure prediction and lane repair in the field, to prevent errors, assure functional safety and increase product lifetime.
Figure 2 - proteanTecs’ continuous performance monitoring application measures operational health in mission mode.
Do you have any news or updates you want to share regarding your company’s roadmap for UCIe?
In-field lane monitoring and redundancy capabilities are now standardized in the UCIe 1.1 specification. UCIe 1.1 directly addresses the need for predictive failure analysis and health monitoring in automotive and high-reliability applications.
In a recent press release, GUC announced their successful 3nm tape-out of a fully UCIe 1.1, UCIe-A (up to 32 Gbps) test chip, integrating the proteanTecs solution. The announcement explains that “every signal lane is continuously monitored and reported separately, and power and signal integrity events are detected. Bumps and traces defects are identified before they cause the interface to fail. A repair algorithm then replaces marginal lanes – with redundant ones to prevent system operation failure, so chip lifetime is extended.”
As the work of UCIe continues and more specifications are introduced, proteanTecs will continue to tailor our on-chip monitoring roadmap to emerging industry trends.
What would you say to a company considering joining UCIe and supporting the chiplet ecosystem?
Join! Participating in the UCIe Consortium has enabled our team to build valuable relationships across the growing chiplet ecosystem. Each contributing company brings a diverse perspective that furthers the collaborative effort needed to move the chiplet and advanced packaging industries forward.