Chiplet-Based RISC-V SoC with Modular AI Acceleration

Achieving high performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness while maintaining architectural flexibility has remained a critical challenge in the development and deployment of Edge AI devices. Current monolithic SoC designs struggle with this complex balance which results in low manufacturing yields (below 16%) at advanced 360 mm2 process nodes. This paper presents a novel chiplet-based RISC-V SoC architecture that addresses these limitations through modular AI acceleration and intelligent system level optimization. Our proposed design integrates four different key innovations in a 30 mm x 30 mm silicon interposer: adaptive cross-chiplet Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS); AI-aware Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) protocol extensions featuring streaming flow control units and compression-aware transfers; distributed cryptographic security across heterogeneous chiplets; and intelligent sensor-driven load migration. The proposed architecture integrates a 7 nm RISC-V CPU chiplet with dual 5 nm AI accelerators (15 TOPS INT8 each), 16GB HBM3 memory stacks, and dedicated power management controllers. Experimental results across industry standard benchmarks like MobileNetV2, ResNet-50 and real-time video processing demonstrate significant performance improvements. The AI-optimized configuration achieves ~14.7% latency reduction, 17.3% throughput improvement, and 16.2% power reduction compared to previous basic chiplet implementations. These improvements collectively translate to a 40.1% efficiency gain corresponding to ≈ 3.5 mJ per MobileNetV2 inference (860 mW / 244 images/s), while maintaining sub-5ms real-time capability across all experimented workloads. These performance upgrades demonstrate that modular chiplet designs can achieve near-monolithic computational density while enabling cost efficiency, scalability and upgradeability, crucial for next-generation edge AI device applications.