Partnership to Develop On-Device Encryption Accelerator
SEMIFIVE is partnering with Niobium to develop a custom AI ASIC for the U.S. market that accelerates fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). This type of specialized silicon is aimed at enabling privacy-preserving computation directly on edge devices.
- Executing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) in software is a significant computational challenge, running 4 to 5 orders of magnitude slower than computations on unencrypted data, which has been a primary obstacle to its widespread use. - The development contract is valued at approximately $6.86 million (KRW 10 billion) and will utilize Samsung Foundry's 8nm Low Power Ultimate (8LPU) process technology. SEMIFIVE is providing a full turnkey solution, managing the process from design through packaging and testing. - Niobium, a U.S. startup founded in 2021, has previously claimed its accelerator designs can run FHE computations 2,500 times faster than a standard CPU. The company's CEO is Kevin Yoder, who previously held roles at Lantronix and Avago Technologies (now Broadcom). - SEMIFIVE was established in 2019 with backing from RISC-V pioneer SiFive and has since raised a total of $147 million from investors including a subsidiary of Singapore's state fund Temasek. It serves as a key design solution partner within the Samsung Foundry ecosystem. - This partnership targets the rapidly expanding AI ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) market, which is projected to grow at a 27% compound annual rate to reach $118 billion by 2033. - A primary application for this technology is in privacy-preserving generative AI, allowing large language model inferences where both user queries and the model's responses stay encrypted during computation.
