SEMIFIVE Secures Record Contract for LPDDR6-Powered Data Center AI Accelerator
South Korean chip design firm SEMIFIVE has secured its largest-ever design contract, worth approximately 70.3 billion KRW (~$52 million USD), to develop a data center AI inference accelerator for an unnamed US fabless customer. The custom ASIC will integrate next-generation LPDDR6 memory alongside a PCIe Gen5 interface using a turnkey specification-handover model. This project represents one of the earliest practical implementations of LPDDR6 memory as off-chip cache for data center AI accelerators, offering high bandwidth at lower power consumption than standard DRAM. It also underlines the rising reliance of US hardware startups on specialized turnkey design partners to execute complex silicon projects. Under the spec handover contract, the client provides target specifications while SEMIFIVE manages the complete workflow—from detailed physical design to packaging, testing, mass production, and software development. Tape-out is slated for the first half of 2027, with mass production and commercial shipments targeted for 2028.
## BACKGROUND
LPDDR6 (Low Power Double Data Rate 6) is a high-speed memory standard defined by JEDEC designed to boost memory bandwidth and energy efficiency for mobile and AI workloads. Spec handover is a chip design service model where the customer provides only top-level architectural requirements, leaving the complex physical implementation and manufacturing logistics to a specialized design house.