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Chiplet Summit 2026 Best of Show Awards, January 2026, Santa Clara Convention Center

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The fourth annual Chiplet Summit returned to the Santa Clara Convention Center with a sense of momentum that felt unmistakable, almost physical, as if the industry itself had decided this was the year chiplets stopped being a promise and became the default direction. The 2026 Best of Show Awards reflected that shift clearly, spotlighting not just clever ideas but technologies already shaping how advanced systems are designed, connected, and packaged. Walking the show floor, you could feel how mature the ecosystem has become—less speculative talk, more concrete workflows, standards, and hardware you can actually build with, right now.

Recognition in the Packaging: Design category went to Siemens EDA, whose Innovator3D IC software stood out for enabling rapid planning and heterogeneous integration of ASICs and chiplets across both 2.5D and 3D packaging technologies. What impressed many attendees wasn’t just the technical depth, but how naturally complex packaging decisions could be explored early in the design phase, before costs and constraints lock teams into painful compromises. It felt like one of those tools that quietly changes daily engineering habits rather than loudly redefining the industry, which is often the more lasting kind of impact.

In Connectivity and Interoperability, the award went to the UCIe Consortium for its UCIe 3.0 specification, a milestone that addresses the rising demand for higher performance and truly interoperable chiplet solutions. At a time when multi-vendor integration is no longer optional, UCIe 3.0 landed as a pragmatic answer to real scaling problems, not just a theoretical framework. Conversations around this win kept circling back to one idea: standards are finally catching up with ambition, and that’s unlocking designs that were simply too risky a year or two ago.

The Packaging: Hardware category highlighted Sarcina Technology, recognized for its advanced chiplet-based AI package design that delivers scalable, high-bandwidth systems through turnkey packaging and test services. What resonated here was the removal of friction—teams no longer needing to build an in-house packaging operation just to experiment or deploy sophisticated AI architectures. It’s the kind of behind-the-scenes capability that accelerates the entire market, even if end users never see the complexity it abstracts away.

Summing up the spirit of the awards, General Chair Chuck Sobey noted that chiplet innovation is everywhere, and the breadth of submissions made the judging process both exciting and demanding. That observation rang true across the summit: design, interoperability, and packaging are no longer separate conversations but tightly interwoven threads. The 2026 Best of Show winners didn’t just demonstrate excellence in their categories; they collectively illustrated how the chiplet ecosystem is evolving into a cohesive, production-ready foundation for the next generation of computing.

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