1. Purpose and scope
This stage decides the shape of the whole product. The system described in the product requirements is divided into dies, each die is given a process node and a likely source (designed in house, reused from an earlier product, or bought from a chiplet supplier), and a packaging technology is chosen to join them. Typical choices are a silicon interposer, an embedded bridge in an organic substrate, a fan-out redistribution layer package, or vertical stacking of dies with through-silicon vias or direct bonding.
The stage matters more in a multi-die product than in a single-chip one because almost every later cost, risk and schedule driver is fixed here: how many die-to-die links are needed, how much bandwidth crosses each boundary, how much heat the package must spread, how many suppliers must work to one plan and how the assembled unit will be tested. Decisions are expensive to reverse once die teams and the package team start in parallel.
In scope: the partitioning trade-off study, the choice of integration technology and its supplier, early power and thermal estimates, the package feasibility study, the first choice of a die-to-die interface standard and the business case comparison against a single large die. Out of scope: detailed interface definition and the bump map, which belong to the die-to-die interface stage, and any die-level design work.
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