Arm's Dong Wei on Why Firmware Will Define the Chiplet Ecosystem

A single Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystem (CSS) deployment helped a partner ship a system-on-chip (SoC) in 13 months and shave roughly 80 engineering years off the build. That return is exactly why conversations at this year’s OCP EMEA Summit in Barcelona kept circling back to one question: is the era of monolithic silicon finally giving way to a true chiplet economy, and if so, what holds the new stack together?

I sat down with Dong Wei, Arm Fellow and Lead Standards Architect, and Colin Brix, VP Marketing at AMI, for an episode of The Control Plane podcast sponsored by AMI, where we looked at the rise of the chiplet economy.  

Challenges to Chiplet Adoption

Dong was careful not to declare the monolithic chip dead. The ability to design a single die is not going anywhere, he explained, but AI is straining its limits because CPU, IO, and memory increasingly want different process nodes. That mismatch, combined with cost and performance pressure, is pushing integrators toward chiplet designs. Hyperscalers including AWS, Microsoft, and Google are already there, stitching together verified IP and custom accelerators into bespoke silicon. Arm introduced the AGI CPU last month using the same approach.

Moving from a handful of vertically integrated SoC vendors to an open, multi-vendor chiplet ecosystem requires foundational standards work. Dong compared the road ahead to the long evolution of Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), which took decades to deliver true interoperability. Chiplets will be tougher, he said, because they are integrated inside the package using costly manufacturing processes, with no easy plugfest equivalent.

Firmware as the Glue Layer

If standards define the rails, firmware drives the train. “I think I see firmware eventually will become a glue layer to tie these things together,” Dong said. He laid out the layers that need standardization beyond physical and electrical interfaces, including telemetry, discovery, configuration, and control. Arm’s contribution of the Foundational Chiplet System Architecture (FCSA) to OCP is one piece of that picture, and Dong pointed to UCIe and other industry efforts as complementary work.

Colin picked up the thread from the firmware partner’s perspective. AMI has spent 40 years being the quiet orchestrator of the ecosystem, but that is changing. With chiplet designs, security, power, and thermal behavior all have to be designed in from the start rather than bolted on later, which means AMI now listens all the way downstream to the customer of the customer and projects that voice back upstream. “It’s not just the silicon enablement partner of the past,” he noted.  

The shift to multi-vendor packages also creates a reliability problem that the monolithic era did not have to solve. A standardized communication path lets firmware redistribute workloads and isolate misbehaving regions while the system keeps running, he said.

Standards That Free Innovation

The conversation tackled the perennial worry that standardization smothers proprietary edge. The right place to draw the line is between interfaces and implementations. “The standards should be focused on the interfaces rather than the implementations.” This way, vendors can keep what is beneath the interfaces proprietary information, while the framework gives the system a common communication path. He compared this to the standardization of coffee pods: if every espresso capsule were a different shape, you would need a different machine for each one. However, once the capsules are standardized, the machines can compete on other parameters. Colin agreed, adding that in his view, the absence of standards actually slows innovation downstream because vertical applications never get the building blocks they need.

The TechArena Take

Although a lot of progress has been made in the development of chiplets, foundational work needs to happen for the broader market to follow. Both Colin and Dong agreed that open interface standards will decide whether chiplets become a true ecosystem or a playground for a few integrators. Firmware will be the layer that makes reliability and sustainability achievable at the package level. As silicon gets more modular, open standards plus firmware are what keep the whole system working smoothly, and Arm and AMI are positioning themselves as the two ends of that pipeline.