UMI : A Universal Memory Interface

Latch-up is absolutely one of my favorite hardware conferences. It’s one of the few conferences dedicated to genuine teaching and learning (rather than just showing off). At Latch-Up 2024, I had the distinct pleasure of presenting our open source UMI protocol which forms the backbone for all of our chiplet activities.

Sources:

https://github.com/zeroasiccorp/umi

Abstract:

Standardized bus architectures like Wishbone and AXI have helped designers construct complex systems from a basic set of interface compliant building blocks (“IPs”). The bus approach has worked well for decades, but requires a large number of wires to implement and doesn’t scale particularly well. For PCB design and System-In-Package design, there are orders of magnitude less wires available and we need to take a fundamentally different approach to communication. The Universal Memory Interface (UMI) is a transaction based communication standard for accessing memory through request-response message exchange patterns, designed to work equally well for complex System-On-Chip designs and chiplet based System-In-Package design. UMI includes a complete open source reference implementation that has been used to design and manufacture four different chiplets in a 12nm CMOS process.

Video:

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