An Interview With Mohamed Awad About Chiplets

We’ve been pulling on the chiplet thread, lately exploring why chiplets matter and what it takes to build a thriving ecosystem:

1. The Long Arc of Semiconductor Scaling

2. Chiplets and the Future of System Design

3. Building the Chiplet Ecosystem

This week at OCP, Arm made an interesting chiplet announcement: it’s contributing an architecture-neutral, vendor-agnostic chiplet spec called the Foundation Chiplet System Architecture to the Open Compute Project.

To unpack the story behind this, I spoke with Mohamed Awad, GM of Arm’s Infrastructure Business. Our 25-minute conversation covers:

• How Arm fits into power-constrained AI datacenters

• The state of chiplets beyond vertically integrated designs

• Why Arm first created its own chiplet specification

• What led to the architecture-neutral Foundation specification

• What the Foundation specification defines versus what it leaves open

• Why Arm contributed the Foundation spec to the Open Compute Project (OCP)

Keep reading for the lightly edited transcript. Or for you 1.5x junkies, watch / listen below:

An Interview with Arm’s Mohamed Awad

So Mohamed, let’s start with you. I want to get to your current role, but first, can you share a bit about your background? I saw that you’ve been on the Arduino board, you spent time at Broadcom and you even worked on Zigbee at Ember. So a great mix of compute, connectivity, system design. Tell us more.

MA: Thanks Austin. Great to be chatting with you. I started as a software engineer. I had this concentration in data communication. So I always loved it. For a couple years I worked at those old infrastructure companies – Lucent, Nortel – and did some of that.

I went on to work at a little startup that was working on mesh networking because I thought wireless was cool. This was back in the early 2000s and that took me to Europe for a while and then eventually took me to Broadcom where I got to do all sorts of fun stuff, everything from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi through to GPS and I even started a custom ASIC business there which went on to build custom ASICs for the likes of Apple.

In 2018 I joined Arm, I went back to my infrastructure roots and have gotten into the compute side of things in a big way. It was a great time to join. Obviously Arm has been on a quick trajectory since 2018 within infrastructure and excited to have played my ...