SEMIFIVE Achieves Mass Production Milestone of its SoC Platform

The first customer AI inference chip based on its SoC Platform enters volume production

SAN JOSE, Calif.-- April 04, 2023 -- SEMIFIVE, a leading design solution provider and pioneer of platform-based custom silicon solutions, announced it has begun mass production of its first SoC Platform-based AI chip product built on Samsung Foundry’s matured 14nm FinFET technology. FuriosaAI is a leading AI chip company in Korea, and its first product WARBOY was developed based on SEMIFIVE’s proprietary AI Inference SoC Platform. WARBOY is already deployed at one of the major cloud data centers in Korea and is serving real-time computer vision applications while delivering competitive performance-power benefits - all with the cloud-proven full software stack.

“WARBOY will be a competitive inference chip in the data center NPU market,” said June Paik, CEO and founder of FuriosaAI. “Together with SEMIFIVE and Samsung Foundry, we were able to achieve one-shot silicon success on the planned schedule, which shows the uncompromising level of engineering rigor and execution. We were able to get to market swiftly, benefitting from SEMIFIVE’s turnkey design service and its SoC Platform technology.”

SEMIFIVE’s AI Inference SoC Platform offers the ideal approach to realize custom AI chips for end applications such as data center accelerators, AI vision processors, big data analytics for image and video recognition. Pre-verified and integrated, SEMIFIVE’s 14nm AI Inference SoC Platform includes a quad-core high performance 64-bit CPU, 8 lanes of PCIe Gen4 and 4-channel LPDDR4X interfaces. To enable end user feature differentiation, the platform allows customer specific IPs such as an AI Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to be added. As part of the complete SoC Platform solution to accelerate final product deployment, SEMIFIVE offers package design and implementation, board support packages as well as software development services.

“Today marks another key milestone for SEMIFIVE in our journey as the New Global Hub of Custom Silicon,” said Brandon Cho, CEO and founder of SEMIFIVE. “Our proven SoC Platform approach will fundamentally change how we build complex systems-on-chips by enabling more companies to design their own differentiated custom chips. We will continue to work with innovative customers and partners to benefit every user with the power of custom silicon.”

“Samsung Foundry is proud and excited to support SEMIFIVE, our SAFE Design Solution Partner (DSP) and its customer to deliver market leading silicon products and services,” Gibong Jeong, Executive Vice President and head of Foundry Business Development team, Samsung Electronics. “Through access to our leading FinFET process technologies, differentiated packaging solutions as well as broad SAFE Ecosystem design enablement, we look forward to more collaboration and joint successes with SEMIFIVE and its partners in delivering the next revolutionary innovation to the industry.”

SEMIFIVE’s SoC platform solution drastically lowers chip development cost, schedule and risks, allowing more diverse industry players to innovate and challenge the semiconductor landscape. Multiple adopters have benefited from its AI inference platform, AIoT and HPC platform developed on Samsung Foundry’s advanced FinFET process technologies. The company plans to add future platforms to address RF (radio frequency), next generation HPC, Automotive and Chiplet applications.

About SEMIFIVE

SEMIFIVE is the pioneer of platform based SoC design, working with customers to implement innovative ideas into custom silicon in the most efficient way. Our SoC platforms offer a powerful springboard for new chip designs and leverage configurable domain-specific architectures and pre-validated key IP pools. We offer comprehensive spec-to-system capabilities with end-to-end solutions so that custom SoCs can be realized faster, with reduced cost and risks for key applications such as data center or AI-enabled IoT. With a strong partnership with Samsung Foundry as a leading SAFETM DSP partner, as well as the larger ecosystem, SEMIFIVE provides a one-stop shop solution for any SoC design needs. For more information, please visit www.semifive.com