Hyperaccel's 'Bertha' enters first mass production
H1 new mass-production orders reach W42.3b
Expanded product lineup doubles last year's annual total
SemiFive, a company specializing in custom AI chips known as ASICs, has begun large-scale mass production of Bertha, a data center AI inference accelerator built on Samsung Foundry's 4-nanometer process.
SemiFive said Tuesday it has started initial mass production of Bertha, the AI inference accelerator developed by AI chipmaker Hyperaccel. This marks the first time SemiFive has moved into large-scale mass production using Samsung Foundry's 4-nanometer process. The company expects additional purchase orders to follow as Hyperaccel expands its services.
Bertha is a data center accelerator specialized for AI inference computations such as large language models. It is a "big die" product with a chip area exceeding 500 square millimeters.
Larger chips face greater challenges in managing power consumption, heat and yield as their size increases. SemiFive handled the entire process, from front-end design and verification to packaging, testing and mass-production supply.
As the AI market's center of gravity shifts from training to inference, the use of custom chips, or ASICs, which offer power efficiency and cost competitiveness, is also increasing.
SemiFive has been expanding its mass-production lineup. It started with Hanwha Vision's security camera AI ASIC, WiseNet9, in the third quarter of last year. This was followed by an AI chip for high-performance computing in Japan in the second quarter of this year, and a data center AI accelerator in the third quarter of this year.
Mass-production orders are also rising. New mass-production orders in the first half of this year reached 42.3 billion won ($31.5 million), about twice last year's annual order total of 21.2 billion won. Orders grew 71 percent, from 15.6 billion won in the first quarter to 26.7 billion won in the second quarter, with overseas orders accounting for 45 percent of the second-quarter total.
"As AI shifts from training to inference, demand for ASIC accelerators in the data center market is surging," said Cho Myung-hyun, CEO of SemiFive. "We have proven our competitiveness in handling everything from design to mass production of large chips exceeding 500 square millimeters."
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