WSC optimizer: an optimization tool for wafer-scale chip architecture exploration

Abstract

In recent years, mature advanced packaging technologies have increasingly enabled the integration of multiple small dies into larger chips, while retaining chip-scale density and high-bandwidth interconnects. To address the inefficiencies of manual design and the challenges of heterogeneous optimization in wafer-scale chip (WSC) development, we systematically explore key factors in WSC architecture design. We integrate chip layout, operator mapping, and hardware-software codesign, and formulate the WSC architecture exploration problem as a multi-objective optimization task. First, we establish a hierarchical architecture model for WSCs, unifying the quantification of core constraints and interconnect topology constraints; second, we propose a hierarchical multi-objective collaborative optimization framework to jointly optimize physical constraints and task mapping communication patterns; finally, we develop a WSC optimizer toolchain that supports mixed-granularity simulation and generates optimal configurations for representative workloads. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with traditional computer architectures, the optimized architectures generated by our WSC optimizer achieve up to a 22× throughput improvement and a 5× latency reduction in application domains, such as cryptographic decryption and signal processing.

Keywords

Wafer-scale chip / Hardware-software co-design / Chip layout / Design space exploration

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The Authors. Published by Zhejiang University Press Co., Ltd.