Chip wars: How ‘chiplets’ are emerging as a core part of China’s tech strategy

The sale of struggling Silicon Valley startup zGlue’s patents in 2021 was unremarkable except for one detail: The technology it owned, designed to cut the time and cost for making chips, showed up 13 months later in the patent portfolio of Chipuller, a startup in China’s southern tech hub Shenzhen.

Chipuller purchased what is referred to as chiplet technology, a cost efficient way to package groups of small semiconductors to form one powerful brain capable of powering everything from data centers to gadgets at home.