Tenstorrent’s Blue Cheetah deal a harbinger of chiplet acquisition spree
Less than a month after Qualcomm announced its acquisition of Alphawave Semi, another chiplet deal is in play. Artificial intelligence (AI) chip developer Tenstorrent has snapped up Blue Cheetah Analog Design after licensing its die-to-die (D2D) interconnect IP for AI and RISC-V chiplet solutions.
Blue Cheetah was founded in 2018 with an initial investment from Marvell co-founders Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai and their pioneering vision for chiplets. Its BlueLynx D2D interconnect subsystem IP provides physical (PHY) and link layer chiplet interfaces compatible with both Open Compute Project (OCP) Bunch of Wires (BoW) and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standards.
Blue Cheetah also brings a wealth of analog mixed-signal expertise in developing D2D, DDR, SerDes, and other technologies critical in chiplet design. It’s co-founder and CEO Elad Alon is an expert in analog and mixed-signal design. He is also the technical lead of the Bunch of Wires PHY standard.
In addition to chiplet designers, Blue Cheetah offers chiplet interconnect IP solutions to various foundries and process nodes. Earlier this year, it announced the successful tape-out of its BlueLynx D2D PHY on Samsung Foundry’s 4-nm SF4X process node.
The latest version of BlueLynx PHY supports both advanced and standard chiplet packaging with an aggregate throughput exceeding 100 Tbps. As a result, the BlueLynx subsystem IP enables chip architects to meet the bandwidth density and environmental robustness necessary to ensure successful production deployment.
Qualcomm’s acquisition of Alphawave Semi and Tenstorrent buying Blue Cheetah mark an important step in the consolidation of the chiplet ecosystem. With the acquisition of Blue Cheetah, Tenstorrent will gain in-house capabilities for advanced interconnects and other analog and mixed-signal components.
Will 2025 be the year of chiplets? Are there more chiplet acquisitions in the works? There are several chiplet upstarts, such as Baya Systems and Chipuller, and likely, larger semiconductor outfits are currently eyeing them to acquire chiplet design capabilities.
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