SEMIFIVE and Niobium to Develop FHE Accelerator
SEMIFIVE has partnered with Niobium to create a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) accelerator ASIC for the U.S. market. FHE allows for computation on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first. The technology is aimed at privacy-preserving AI and secure edge computing for sensitive applications in the medical, industrial, and defense sectors.
- The development contract is valued at approximately 10 billion South Korean Won (USD 6.86 million), and the resulting accelerator will be manufactured using Samsung Foundry's 8nm Low Power Ultimate (8LPU) process technology. - SEMIFIVE, as a key Design Solution Partner in the Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE), is providing a complete turnkey ASIC solution that covers design, packaging, testing, and supply chain management. - Niobium Microsystems was spun out of Galois, a firm with deep expertise in cryptography and formal methods, in 2021 to focus on creating trusted microelectronic systems for commercial and defense markets. - Hardware acceleration is critical for FHE because software-only implementations can be thousands of times slower than computation on unencrypted data, which has so far hindered widespread practical adoption. - The security of many modern FHE schemes is based on lattice-based cryptography problems, which are believed to be resistant to attacks from future quantum computers. - Niobium CEO Kevin Yoder stated this project represents the company's transition from prototype systems to production-ready silicon suitable for customer deployments in encrypted cloud and AI environments. - The partnership aims to create one of the first commercially viable FHE accelerators, targeting privacy-centric applications like private cloud services and Zero Trust computing architectures.
