Design house (DSP) companies that once focused on outsourced semiconductor design are expanding in both contract pricing and funding scale as AI chip mass production becomes harder with foundry steps alone after 2-nanometre nodes. With physical limits nearing, 2.5D and 3D stacking and chiplets are becoming key, making advanced packaging and interconnect new battlegrounds. Firms are shifting toward integrated design platforms and infrastructure architecture partnerships, alongside rising high-value project shares and larger financings.

SemiFive said on March 13 it signed a turnkey contract to develop an AI neural processing unit based on Samsung Electronics\' 4-nanometre (SF4X) process. The contract is worth about 18 billion won ($12.5 million). The customer is an AI semiconductor fabless company, but its name was not disclosed. The NPU targets on-premise AI processing without network connections and is designed for real-time handling of large-scale data.