AI chip firm Sapeon will collaborate with design house Alphawave Semi to develop its Gen 3 AI chip, X430, TheElec has learned.
Sapeon signed a 59.6 billion won deal with the design house in February for the design service.
X430, which will launch in 2026, will be made with TSMC’s 5-nanometer (nm) node. Chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), TSMC’s 2.5D packaging technology, and high bandwidth memory (HBM) technologies will also be applied.
Sapeon’s decision to collaborate with Alphawave Semi likely stems from the latter’s experience in CoWoS and its track record of designing 5nm and 3nm chips.
The South Korean AI chip firm will continue to work with design house ASICLand, which it is collaborating with on X330 launched last year.
Alphawave Semi is a member of TSMC’s Value Chain Alliance and offers its services in North America and Europe.
Design houses act as a bridge between fabless chip companies and chip foundry companies. They make their fabless customers' chip designs applicable for production.
X430 is expected to be powered by a HBM3E; X330 uses a GDDR6. CoWoS has the logic die and HBM mounted on the interposer; it has been used in Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips.
X330, which will go into mass production this year, has four AI cores and 16 RISC-V CPU cores. It also has a video cluster codec, eight 16GB GDDR6, and Gen 5 PCIe interface.
