February 16, 2026
Silicon goes IKEA
Chiplets Get Physical: The Days of Mix-and-Match Silicon Draw Nigh
LEGO-style chips are here—fans hype, skeptics ask if it’s old tech in a shiny box
TLDR: Cadence is pushing mix‑and‑match chiplets for edge AI like cars and drones, moving beyond closed multi‑chip modules. Comments split: some crown Intel, others demand cheap RAM, and many want drag‑and‑drop chip builders—big dream, but standards and plain‑English explainers still lag.
Chiplet fever is peaking as Cadence rolls into Chiplet Summit 2026 with a keynote on mix‑and‑match silicon for physical AI—that’s AI inside real‑world machines like cars, drones, and robots. The comments instantly turned into a tech soap opera: is this the future of “build‑your‑own brain,” or just a rebrand of stuff veterans have used for decades?
One camp is begging for plain English. vessenes asked if chiplets are just tiny chips clicked together on one base, and why that’s better than slapping separate chips on a regular board. The hot‑take crowd answered with brand wars: jauntywundrkind crowned Intel for its 3D stacking (“Foveros”) and shaded AMD for still blasting data through big, power‑hungry interfaces. The penny‑pinchers chimed in with amelius: forget chiplets until RAM gets cheap.
Then the thread went full meme. Taniwha pitched the dream of a website where you drag‑and‑drop chiplets, hit a button, and “brrr‑zap” robots ship your custom super‑brain the same day—cue IKEA jokes, build‑a‑bot fantasies, and a thousand “take my money” gifs. Under the drama sits the real shift: not just stacking chips, but an open marketplace with standard links so anyone can mix parts. If the standards show up, the plug‑and‑play robot future might actually be real.
Key Points
- •Cadence will deliver a keynote at Chiplet Summit 2026 on modular multi-die designs for AI, edge, and physical AI systems.
- •“Physical AI” is defined as AI processing at the edge in systems like autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots; aerospace and defense have distinct requirements.
- •The term “physical AI systems” is relatively new, gaining broader use since the early-to-mid 2020s.
- •Multi-die technology has evolved from 1960s ceramic substrate assemblies through 1970s hybrid microelectronics and 1980s MCMs (MCM-C, MCM-D), leading to modern chiplets.
- •Traditional multi-die devices use proprietary company-controlled interfaces; the chiplet vision targets open-market mix-and-match components with benefits like yield optimization, process-node mixing, IP reuse, and scalable performance.