Tenstorrent, the Jim Keller-led AI chip company, is taking the lead on an industry effort to create open standards for chiplet-based silicon designs.

The Open Chiplet Atlas (OCA) ecosystem was unveiled at the firm’s recent event in San Francisco and aims to bring standardization to chiplets to bring greater design flexibility and faster time-to-market.

Some 50 organizations are taking part in OCA, including LG, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and Japanese government’s sovereign chipmaking startup Rapidus.

“The future of silicon is heterogeneous and composable,” Wei-han Lien, Tenstorrent’s chief architect, explained. “The OCA Ecosystem establishes the foundation of trust and interoperability needed to unlock the full potential of multivendor chiplet-based SoC products.

The OCA’s proposed standards would see its specifications and frameworks available on a royalty-free basis, a move it suggests would help to “ensur[e] a level playing field for the entire industry.”

The group will focus on open architectures that define chiplet interoperability across five distinct layers: physical, transport, protocol, system, and software. Its v0.7 draft specification is available for public review.

“Establishing a standard that allows customers to mix-and-match chiplets from various vendors is a crucial step toward simplifying the enormously complex task of physical integration, Hirotaka Minami, Rapidus’s senior director, noted. “We believe the OCA ecosystem will enable foundries like ours to efficiently manufacture next-generation systems for a diverse and innovative market.”

Lien added: “This is not just a new standard, it’s the beginning of a collaborative community that will drive the next generation of system innovation. The OCA Ecosystem starts a new silicon design paradigm.”

Tenstorrent was founded in 2016 and is building AI accelerators for both the cloud and edge. Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions and Samsung Securities count among its backers, with its valuation standing at more than $2.6 billion following a successful Series D funding round last December.

The startup in July acquired Blue Cheetah Analog Design, which is building interconnect IP solutions for chiplets.

Keller, the legendary processor architect, joined Tenstorrent in January 2021 and serves as its CEO. Among his multitude of accomplishments is having helped develop self-driving chips for Tesla and served as lead architect for AMD’s K8 microarchitecture.

Prior to Tenstorrent, Keller was at Intel, where as SVP for silicon engineering led a project aimed at revitalizing the firm’s chip architecture – an effort that yielded little in what was yet another hallmark in the company’s R&D mismanagement.

Standard groups, they’re everywhere

The OCA Ecosystem is the latest in a growing number of semiconductor-related standard groups.

Several organizations are looking to create open standards to push data center infrastructure to the next level, such as the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP)’s recently unveiled ESUN working group, which is examining networking for AI clusters.

There’s also the UALink Consortium, which released its first GPU interconnect specification back in April, and the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), whose 1.0 specification dropped in mid-July.

The Tenstorrent-led OCA Ecosystem isn’t the only open standards group around chiplets, however.

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) Consortium is attempting to create an open ecosystem of chiplets, specifically “a ubiquitous interconnect at the package level.”

The likes of Google, Meta, and Microsoft are all backing its efforts, which are largely based on PCI Express (PCIe) and Compute Express Link (CXL) standards. The group has launched several specifications, with UCIe 3.0 having been released back in July.

There’s also the Intel-led Chiplet Alliance, which focuses on standards around design simplification through modular, interconnected dies. Other supporters include Arm, Cadence, Siemens, and Synopsys.

In addition to the Chiplet Alliance, the embattled Intel is also working on an initiative to counter the growing dominance of Arm processors. Last October it came together with AMD to form the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group to improve consistency across x86 product offerings.