$40 Million In Backers, Including Intel And Micron
It’s a little early to sound the demise of TSMC, but it does look like they might have some new competition. Eliyan are offering an alternative interconnect technology they’ve called NuLink, to compete with TSMC’s CoWoS and Intel’s EMIB designs. The founders of Eliyan hope that their technology will be used in partnership with the existing processes, they don’t intend to try to unseat the two behemoths.
Eliyan’s CEO Ramin Farjadran, once of Marvell Semiconductor, feels that the current interconnect designs are expensive to make and slow to produce; which is not wrong. NuLink is intended to be cheaper and quicker to fabricate as well as being made from materials that are easier to source than what TSMC and Intel currently use. It is based on a bunch-of-wires (BoW) design, such as is found in the Open Compute Project and any fab company should be able to adopt the design easily.
It is a new take on an existing technology, and is compliant with the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard developed by Intel which should help tempt companies to at least consider trying it out. Drop by The Register for more details on the technology and the people behind it.