At Darpa’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative Summit, speaker after speaker agreed that the chiplets are coming. Instead of building complex systems-on-chip as one piece of silicon, as is done today, future systems will be made of smaller, cheaper, independently designed component chips bound together on a larger slice of silicon by high-bandwidth interconnects. One of the hardest parts is getting these chiplets to communicate properly and at a speed and energy cost that’s close to what they’d be if the system were all one piece of silicon.

Intel CTO Mike Mayberry unveiled his company’s contribution toward that effort, Tuesday, saying that Intel will provide its Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) royalty free to help link chiplets together. AIB is a standard communications interface made for connecting different dies (unpackaged chips) in the same package.