Azicland will participate as a key partner in SK Hynix’s development of a next-generation enterprise SSD. Azicland said on June 29 it signed a contract to provide customised design services and tape-out support for the development of SK Hynix’s next enterprise SSD controller. The contract is worth 31.9 billion won and runs from May 27, 2025 to Dec. 31, 2027.

Azicland is a specialist in application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design solutions and is the only domestic partner in TSMC’s Value Chain Alliance (VCA). Through this cooperation, Azicland will provide SK Hynix with ASIC design and verification capabilities based on TSMC’s advanced process. The scope is not limited to design and verification and extends to the manufacturing execution stage after commercialisation.

The company said that as the AI training and inference, cloud services and high-performance computing (HPC) markets expand, the performance and power efficiency of data-centre storage have emerged as key variables in infrastructure competitiveness. An enterprise SSD controller, which controls data flow between servers and storage devices, is a semiconductor that directly affects processing speed, stability and power efficiency. As storage demand for AI data centres increases, the importance of next-generation controller technology is also growing.

Lee Jong-min (이종민), Azicland’s CEO, said, “Based on the TSMC advanced-process design experience and verification capabilities we have accumulated, we will provide top-level design services so that customers’ next-generation product development requiring advanced processes can be carried out stably, and we will continue to expand our capabilities to provide seamless support through to the manufacturing execution stage.”