From Virtual Prototypes to Chiplet Platforms: Engineering the Future of Automotive Compute  

The automotive industry is undergoing a profound architectural shift as vehicles evolve into high‑performance, software‑defined systems. However, the higher quality and reliability (QnR) requirements in the automotive industry elevate complexity and necessitate novel solutions from the architecture down to the level of materials. Meeting these demands requires new design paradigms, and chiplet‑based architectures are emerging as a powerful path forward. In my role as an R&D researcher/engineer at imec, I am involved at Automotive Chiplet Program (ACP), an initiative that brings together industry partners to evaluate emerging technologies and define next‑generation automotive compute architectures. This is the intersection of semiconductor innovation, system architecture, and collaborative engineering — developing a chiplet‑based platform that spans from high‑level functional simulation to full‑system emulation.

In this talk, it will be demonstrated how the design space of a multi-chiplet automotive system is explored using an end-to-end virtual platform for early analysis. The platform brings the opportunity of system designer to evaluate the system performance around the emerging technologies and die to die interconnects. Considering the full hardware prototypes, the flow annotates the effect of new technologies on the system performance. Throughout this talk, I will share how we design and validate heterogeneous multi‑die systems in collaboration with automotive partners, and how early‑stage ideas evolve into concrete architectural components within a shared R&D ecosystem. The session will highlight both the technical challenges — from system‑level modeling to cross‑chiplet integration — and the engineering practices that enable innovation: proposing unconventional solutions, validating them through rigorous experimentation, and driving them toward adoption within a multi‑stakeholder environment.

By connecting technical insights with the creative processes behind platform development, this talk aims to spark discussion on how engineers can shape emerging technologies while contributing to inclusive, high‑impact teams across the automotive and semiconductor landscape and how this can help them in building their careers.

Biography

Katayoon Basharkhah is an R&D engineer and researcher at imec, contributing to the development of next generation automotive compute through chiplet based system architectures. With a 10-years background that spans both academia and industry, she brings deep expertise in system level modeling and platform driven innovation.

she applies this mindset within the Automotive Chiplet Program, a collaborative initiative that brings together leading industry partners to evaluate emerging semiconductor technologies and define future automotive architectures.

Katayoon has a Ph.D degree in digital electronic systems from University of Tehran and her current research interests include hardware design, system-level design, modeling and virtual platforms.