A South Korean design services firm has won a turnkey contract to help a local chip developer build silicon for robots, part of a government push to keep more of the country’s AI hardware work at home.
SEMIFIVE will develop the processor for Mobilint under a program run by Korea’s trade and industry ministry. That effort, called K-On-Device AI Semiconductor Technology Development, links chip designers with companies that will actually use the parts, with the goal of getting working silicon into products rather than leaving it in a lab.
The chip is meant to run capable AI models by itself, including in places where a dependable link to a remote server is not available. Robots working outdoors, such as those used in farming, are the first target. Such machines have to read camera and sensor feeds and act on them immediately, which puts a premium on doing the computation locally.
Mobilint’s design is expected to draw on a newer generation of low-power memory along with an interconnect standard that lets several chiplets inside one package behave as a single device.
SEMIFIVE said the work will use its earliest-stage engagement model, in which a customer sets the performance targets and specifications and the design house carries the job from there. Mobilint has been developing its own neural processors, and the contract extends that roadmap into robotics.
SEMIFIVE chief executive Brandon Cho said the deal takes the company past the data center and edge AI markets it has served so far. Both firms cast the work as a building block for a domestic AI chip supply chain in Korea.
