Coasia Semi Korea, the chip design house subsidiary of Kosdaq-listed Coasia, is taking part in Canadian AI NPU startup Tenstorrent’s development project for their next-generation AI chip, TheElec has learned.
Tenstorrent is led by CEO Jim Keller, the legendary microprocessor engineer known for his works at AMD, Apple, and Tesla. In South Korea, Tenstorrent is known to have Hyundai Motor and Samsung as its investors.
According to Coasia, Tenstorrent has called the project Quasar __ an extremely luminous supermassive black hole. The chip will be made using Samsung Foundry, though not its latest gate-all-around 3-nanometer (nm) node but its FinFET 4nm node, likely for the latter’s stable yield rate.
Coasia Semi’s contract with Tenstorrent is not turn-key but a service contract, sources said. In a turn-key contract, the design house will buy the completed wafers from the contract chipmaker and sell them to the customer, which guarantees profits until the end of the chip’s life span. In a service contract, the design house receives two to three payments through the development process until the contract expires, so they are less profitable. Nonetheless, as Tenstorrent is a well-known customer, the deal is a boost for Coasia Semi to attract more customers in the future.
Under the pair’s contract, which is likely worth tens of billions of won, Tenstorrent will send Coasia Semi the front end of its NPU design. Coasia Semi will then handle the back end work such as circuit placement, place & route, and mask design before sending the completed design to Samsung Foundry. Coasia Semi is planning to tape-out __ that is, send the completed design to the contract chipmaker __ Quasar by mid-2025.
The NPU is expected to be a completed commercial product optimized for AI inference. It will use GDDR7 as the main memory instead of the pricier high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Tenstorrent’s aim is to offer a high performance chip that is a relatively cheaper alternative to Nvidia’s GPU, which is dominating the AI inference market, sources said.
Meanwhile, Coasia reorganized Coasia Semi’s share structure during the first half of the year. Coasia Semi was originally wholly owned by Coasia Semi Singapore PTE. LTD. Coasia Semi bought all the shares from this entity for 8.6 billion won; Coasia then took part in Coasia Semi’s share offering and bought all the shares for 10.4 billion won.
Then, in July, Taiwan’s Sheng Bang Investment Corporation bought convertible preferred shares issued by Coasia Semi for 40.5 billion won. Sheng Bang is a wholly owned investment company of Faraday Technology, a Taiwanese design house and an official design solution partner of Samsung Foundry. The preferred shares were sold for 90,000 won per share, and following Sheng Bang’s investment, Coasia Semi was valued at approximately 250 billion won, higher than Coasia’s market capitalization on Kosdaq, the South Korean bourse.
Coasia Semi commenced another share offering this week, selling its shares for 100,000 won per share, raising 19.2 billion won. These investments were a much-needed boon for the design house. It recorded 4.9 billion won in revenue and an operating loss of 7.8 billion won last year. Coasia Semi’s capital stood at negative 28.3 billion won. Coasia Semi was collaborating with a design house partner to win a turn-key deal from another customer, an AI chip company based in North America, sources said, which gives its valuation more credence.
