SEMIFIVE and Niobium to Build FHE Accelerator
Custom silicon firm SEMIFIVE has partnered with Niobium to develop a U.S.-targeted accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). The chip is designed for privacy-preserving AI, a market expected to grow due to data residency and regulatory pressures.
- The development contract is valued at approximately $6.86 million (KRW 10 billion), with SEMIFIVE providing a full turnkey solution that includes design, packaging, testing, and supply chain management. - The accelerator will be manufactured using Samsung Foundry's 8nm Low Power Ultimate (8LPU) process, a key technical detail indicating a focus on balancing performance with power efficiency for datacenter and AI workloads. - South Korea-based SEMIFIVE was founded in 2019 and has raised a total of $147 million, establishing itself as a key design partner in the Samsung Foundry ecosystem and a specialist in custom System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms. - Niobium Microsystems, a U.S.-based startup founded in 2021, spun out of cryptography and formal methods R&D firm Galois with a focus on commercializing FHE hardware for Zero Trust computing environments. - The market for fully homomorphic encryption is forecast to expand significantly, with various analyst projections estimating it will grow to between $500 million and $1 billion by the early 2030s. - Hardware acceleration is essential for FHE's commercial viability, as software-based FHE can be four to five orders of magnitude slower than computation on unencrypted data, making it impractical for most real-world AI applications. - This collaboration taps into the broader custom silicon market, which is projected to reach nearly $43.4 billion by 2030, driven by companies seeking performance gains, power efficiency, and intellectual property protection not available from off-the-shelf chips. [16
