Semiconductor design platform corporations Semifive has begun mass production of HyperAccel's data center AI inference accelerators. This is the first case in which Semifive has moved into large-scale mass production using Samsung Electronics' foundry 4-nanometer (nm, one-billionth of a meter) process.
Semifive said on the 8th that it will mass-produce HyperAccel's inference accelerators for large language models (LLMs) using Samsung Electronics' 4-nm process. It plans to take additional purchase orders (POs) and increase output as HyperAccel's customer base expands.
The accelerator going into mass production this time is a large-area chip with a die size of more than 500 ㎟. As the semiconductor die area increases, the number of chips that can be produced from a single wafer decreases and the likelihood of exposure to defects rises, making it more difficult to secure Production yield. Power and heat management and packaging complexity also increase.
In this project, Semifive handled the entire process from front-end design and verification to packaging, testing, and final mass production supply.
Semifive has recently been expanding mass-production projects centered on AI semiconductors. In the third quarter of last year, it mass-produced Hanwha Vision's "Wisenet 9," an AI chip for security cameras, and in the second quarter of this year, it mass-produced an AI semiconductor for high-performance computing (HPC) in Japan. The data center AI accelerator entered mass production in the third quarter of this year.
New mass-production orders also increased. Semifive's new mass-production orders in the first half of this year totaled 42.3 billion won, about twice last year's annual order value of 21.2 billion won. By quarter, they rose 71% from 15.6 billion won in the first quarter to 26.7 billion won in the second quarter. Overseas orders accounted for 45% of the second-quarter total.
Cho Myung-hyun, CEO of Semifive, said, "As the AI market expands from training to inference, demand for data center ASIC accelerators is growing rapidly," and added, "With this mass production, we have secured the capability to handle everything from design to mass production of large-area chips over 500 ㎟."