Antmicro GEM ASIC Leverages zGlue Technology to Quickly Bring Custom Arm/RISC-V SoC’s to Market

Introduced in 2018, ZiP (zGlue Integration Platform) chip-stacking technology aims to produce chips similar to Systems-in-Package (SiP) but at much lower costs and lead times.

We first found it in a Bluetooth tracker featuring ZGLZ1BA custom chip manufactured with zGlue technology and integrating an Arm Cortex-M0 MCU, flash memory and sensors into a single package. But now the technology is back in the news with Antmicro announcing GEM chiplet-based ASIC last December.

At the time of the announced the company’s GEM1 chip featured two Lattice iCE40 FPGAs with a MIPI CSI-2 switch, and they had started working on GEM2 chip combining a hard RISC-V processor and Lattice iCE40 FPGA.

Those are so-called demonstrators chip as Antmicro customers will be able to easily and quickly design their own 6×9 mm chip(s) with RISC-V and/or ARM CPUs, FPGAs, sensors, radios and other functional elements to meet the requirements of their specific applications. The company will provide support for open-source operating systems such as Zephyr RTOS or Linux for the chip.

Antmicro and zGlue will be showcasing the GEM processors at Embedded World 2020 in the context of their OSHW development services (baseboard, modules), BSP development (GEM running Zephyr on a Raven RISC-V soft CPU), FPGA development (GEM built around two Lattice iCE40 FPGAs) and AI development (live video analysis in Lattice iCE40 with MIPI CSI-2 switch for on-the-fly re-routing to the camera), and more. They will be at Hall 4A / 4A-621 stand at the event.

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