Wafer-scale integration (WSI) bypasses the traditional step of dicing a silicon wafer into individual chips. Instead, the entire wafer is wired together as one giant, highly interconnected system. This approach drastically increases bandwidth and reduces latency between computing cores, but it requires extreme defect tolerance because a single flaw cannot be simply discarded like a standard bad chip.
They're using a WSI approach for their new AI accelerator to get the memory as close to the compute cores as possible.
Related terms
Wafer-scale integration
A manufacturing approach where an entire silicon wafer is used as a single massive integrated circuit.
Wafer
A highly polished slice of semiconductor material used as the foundation for fabricating integrated circuits.
VLSI
Very large-scale integration is the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining thousands to millions of transistors onto a single chip.