Decades of progress in energy-efficient and low-power design have successfully reduced the operational carbon footprint in the semiconductor industry. However, this has led to an increase in embodied emissions, encompassing carbon emissions arising from design, manufacturing, packaging, and other infrastructural activities. While existing research has developed tools to analyze embodied carbon at the computer architecture level for traditional monolithic systems, these tools do not apply to near-mainstream heterogeneous integration (HI) technologies. HI systems offer significant potential for sustainable computing by minimizing carbon emissions through two key strategies: ``reducing" computation by reusing pre-designed chiplet IP blocks and adopting hierarchical approaches to system design. The reuse of chiplets across multiple designs, even spanning multiple generations of integrated circuits (ICs), can substantially reduce embodied carbon emissions throughout the operational lifespan. This paper introduces a carbon analysis tool specifically designed to assess the potential of HI systems in facilitating greener VLSI system design and manufacturing approaches. The tool takes into account scaling, chiplet and packaging yields, design complexity, and even carbon overheads associated with advanced packaging techniques employed in heterogeneous systems. Experimental results demonstrate that HI can achieve a reduction of embodied carbon emissions up to 70\% compared to traditional large monolithic systems. These findings suggest that HI can pave the way for sustainable computing practices, contributing to a more environmentally conscious semiconductor industry.

翻译：数十年来，能效与低功耗设计的进步已成功降低了半导体行业的运行碳足迹。然而，这导致体现在碳排放（包括设计、制造、封装及其他基础设施活动产生的碳排放）的增加。尽管现有研究已开发出在计算机架构层面分析传统单芯片系统体现碳的工具，但这些工具并不适用于近乎主流的异构集成（HI）技术。HI系统通过两种关键策略在最小化碳排放方面展现出可持续计算潜力：通过复用预设计的芯粒知识产权模块"减少"计算量，并采用层次化方法进行系统设计。芯粒在多个设计（甚至跨越多代集成电路）中的复用可大幅降低其在全生命周期内的体现碳排放。本文介绍了一种专门设计的碳分析工具，用于评估HI技术在实现更环保的超大规模集成电路系统设计与制造方法方面的潜力。该工具综合考虑了缩放效应、芯粒与封装良率、设计复杂度，甚至异构系统中先进封装技术带来的碳开销。实验结果表明，与传统的单芯大芯片系统相比，HI技术可实现高达70%的体现碳排放降低。这些发现表明，HI技术可为可持续计算实践铺平道路，助力构建更环保的半导体产业。