By Kate Yuan

The global chip technology organization UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) announced adding Alibaba as its new board member, the first from China’s mainland, joining the ten founding members, according to its official website on August 2. Nvidia is the other newly-elected board member. 

Zhang Weifeng, chief scientist of Heterogeneous Computing at Alibaba Cloud, said, “UCIe will bring huge benefits in terms of interoperability and cost to the global Chiplet ecosystem as a universal and open standard. Alibaba will join hands with other key industry partners to jointly promote the prosperity of the chiplet ecosystem.”

UCIe is an open specification that defines the interconnecting between chiplets within a package, enabling an open chiplet ecosystem and ubiquitous interconnecting at the package level.

UCIe’s members include Promoters, Contributors, and Adopters. The organization is led by the ten Promoter companies - the board members：ASE Group, AMD, Arm, Google Cloud, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC. Only the last two membership levels are open for application. 

Many enterprises from China’s mainland have joined the organization including VeriSilicon, Akrostar, JCET Group, and OPPO. With the continuous growth of China's Chiplet ecosystem, Alibaba’s election as a board member marks a new milestone for UCIe.

Alibaba has made in-depth explorations in heterogeneous integration before. At the recently held ISCA 2022, the top international conference on computer architecture, Zhang Weifeng shared Alibaba Cloud’s Heterogeneity-Aware Lowering and Optimization (HALO) and Open Deep Learning API (ODLA) from the software ecosystem level, which is very suitable as a software and hardware collaborative computing platform for Chiplet acceleration system.