Supply Chain Aware Computer Architecture

Progressively and increasingly, our society has become more and more dependent on semiconductors and semiconductor-enabled products and services. The importance of chips and their supply chains has been highlighted during the 2020-present chip shortage caused by manufacturing disruptions and increased demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, semiconductor supply chains are inherently vulnerable to disruptions and chip crises can easily recur in the future. We present the first work that elevates supply chain conditions to be a first-class design constraint for future computer architectures. We characterize and model the chip creation process from standard tapeout to packaging to provide a framework for architects to quickly assess the time-to-market of their chips depending on their architecture and the current market conditions. In addition, we propose a novel metric, the Chip Agility Score (CAS) - a way to quantify a chip architecture’s resilience against production-side supply changes. We utilize our proposed time-to-market model, CAS, and chip design/manufacturing economic models to evaluate prominent architectures in the context of current and speculative supply chain changes. We find that using an older process node to re-release chips can decrease time-to-market by 73%-116% compared to using the most advanced processes. Also, mixed-process chiplet architectures can be 24%-51% more agile compared to equivalent single-process chiplet and monolithic designs respectively. Guided by our framework, we present an architectural design methodology that minimizes time-to-market and chip creation costs while maximizing agility for mass-produced legacy node chips. Our modeling framework and data sets are open-sourced to advance supply chain aware computer architecture research. https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/ttm-cas.