Software Defined Vehicles
Interview with Bart Placklé, Imec
“We need leading edge solutions, which form the heart of the car”
Chiplet architectures are redefining the automotive industry. Imec’s Bart Placklé explains how modular design, interoperability, and ecosystem collaboration can help Europe regain leadership in high-performance vehicle computing.
With more than two decades of experience in automotive and semiconductor technology, Bart Placklé has shaped some of the most fundamental transformations in the industry – from infotainment consolidation and domain controller evolution to Intel’s early autonomous mobility programs. As Vice President Automotive at Imec, he now leads efforts to advance chiplet integration as a foundation for next-generation high-performance automotive computing.
At the Automotive Computing Conference 2025, Placklé will speak about the structural and economic limits of traditional SoC design and why open, interoperable chiplet ecosystems are the key to scalable, sovereign computing in Europe. In the run-up to the conference, we spoke with him about the technological and structural shifts driving the future of automotive computing.
ADT: Automotive computing performance is reaching physical and economic limits in traditional System-on-Chip design. From your perspective, how can chiplets help the industry regain leadership in high-performance automotive computing?
Placklé: By cars becoming semi-autonomous, the overall compute requirements for self-driving artificial intelligence and inference are exponentially growing (the perception and prediction of the environment around the car). At the same time, thanks to automated driving, the car really becomes a true, perfect entertainment or office on wheels again, driving the in-cabin compute requirements to unseen levels through the need for edge agentic artificial intelligence. If you now combine these challenges with the fact that most high-performance electronic control units are consolidating into a single high-performance computing control unit, it is clear that the compute requirements continue to surge beyond anything we have ever seen. But the challenge does not stop here.
How do these escalating performance demands translate into economic and structural challenges for the industry?
Even if automated driving and advanced driver assistance systems are installed in most of the roughly 90 million cars produced each year—a figure that continues to decline—the automotive industry still operates at volumes far below those of smartphones, yet demands computing performance that is vastly higher. So, from a business-case perspective, we have a two-orders-of-magnitude problem, with the latest monolithic advanced solutions already costing around two billion to develop, resulting in only a few players remaining. I think the statement "this is not on a good trajectory" is an understatement. Everything I mentioned was written in the stars and is why we started taking a right-hand turn by building such high-performance computing systems differently. And if you do not think this was challenging enough, we did not anticipate the geopolitical climate, where the supply chain is no longer a given. The heart and DNA of the car are software and high-performance computing, and this is where Europe has a real problem: we do not have leading edge solutions, which form the heart of the car. That has to change, and it has to change now.
So where do you see the starting point for this change? How can Europe realistically catch up in high-performance computing and semiconductor technology?
We do not have leading edge solutions, but we have very good building blocks, as seen in the stellar European example where Airbus was able to build the most successful airplanes not by trying to do everything themselves but by pulling all state-of-the-art assets from the region. That is exactly what we are doing with automotive chiplets. We have best-in-class artificial intelligence accelerators, high-performance CPU architectures like Arm and later RISC-V. We have companies like NXP and Infineon that are excelling in input/output, safety, and cybersecurity, and Bosch is creating the automotive context with a base die. We have all the right technology to pull this together. Building the "Airbus" for automotive high-performance computing is the path to a state-of-the-art automotive sovereignty (robotics will adopt the same). To make this ready and economically scalable, we need to ensure the chiplets are interoperable (can be developed independently of each other and "late bound," assembled on a package) and that the technology survives the strong automotive environmental mission profiles. By aligning the ecosystem through interoperability and focused research on quality and reliability, we aim to accelerate and de-risk the adoption of automotive chiplets — paving the way toward sovereign, state-of-the-art vehicle technology.
At the ACC 2025, you will discuss interface standardization as a path to cost-competitive chiplet solutions. What progress has been made toward interoperability, and what still needs to happen for true scalability across suppliers?
When we started, the first focus was convincing the industry that the right-hand turn to chiplets is the right way to go. Today we do not have to convince anyone about chiplets, but to your question, what is needed for chiplets to "fly" (or drive) is seamless chiplet interoperability. If single vertical ecosystems stick to their proprietary set of chiplets, you will not have the scale and re-use across different suppliers. You end up with a cost structure that could be even higher than the reticle-size monolithic solutions, as the heterogeneous and yield savings will not be enough to offset the need for doing all the chiplet tape-outs yourself. The whole value only works when you have multiple CPU, GPU, base die, and artificial intelligence units that can be used in different constellations for different performance levels and customers. That is key to affordability.
What needs to be in place to make such scalable chiplet solutions truly interoperable across different vendors and architectures?
The chiplet success caused a whirlwind in the ecosystem, where everyone now starts having a chiplet product, but they are mainly compatible only with themselves. Our first focus right now is to create a reference specification to ensure chiplets can talk to each other. To really allow late binding, it is by far not sufficient that the die-to-die physical layer is aligned. The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express does a great job on the physical layer, but late-binding interoperability requires alignment on the higher-level protocols, sidebands, boot, safety, and software constructs. With the Imec Automotive Chiplet Platform Reference Architecture Specification, we are trying to glue all these dependencies together—not with the goal of reinventing the wheel, but to pull all relevant standards together and steer existing standards where needed to achieve end-to-end chiplet interoperability.
Imec has been instrumental in driving chiplet innovation from concept to prototype. How do you see collaboration between research institutes, foundries, and OEMs evolving to turn chiplet architectures into a real automotive success story?
Our Imec automotive chiplet program is now entering its third year. We modeled various die-to-die interoperability levels and built several thermal-mechanical test vehicles to understand how far we can take packaging technology that fulfills the automotive cost, performance, and quality requirements. While this has been a great success, we need to move fast and bring the learning closer to production, as we do not have five years to make this turn. Therefore, we decided to go one step further, we no longer just focus on thermal-mechanical vehicles. In Heilbronn (a city in southern Germany – editor’s note), we will start building functional reference designs by combining existing and future chiplets from the ecosystem as a way to accelerate and de-risk production.
What additional insights do you expect from actually building and testing these reference designs, compared to purely simulated or theoretical models?
By physically building such chiplets on a package and bringing them up, there will be many learnings we can share with the ecosystem—from supply chain challenges when wafers and chiplets are being passed around to implementing safety, boot, power, cooling, and system management. Everyone needs to go through the learning curve when they move to chiplets. Every time we integrate a new chiplet, we will encounter new challenges, such as small package or protocol mismatches—and who knows what else we have not thought of yet. Heilbronn is going to be a test bed for chiplet integration, just as core Imec is a test bed for new process technologies—to learn what fails, recommend what works, and pursue one goal: accelerating and de-risking the adoption of automotive chiplets.
