SemiFive secures design win with Niobium for FHE accelerator

The contract is valued at around KRW 10 billion (USD 6.86 million) and covers the development of what the company describes as one of the world’s first commercially viable FHE accelerators, enabling computation directly on encrypted data. The capability is positioned for privacy‑centric workloads, private cloud services and AI infrastructure in Zero Trust computing environments, the company states in a press release.

Niobium’s FHE accelerator is intended to deliver high‑performance processing while offering advantages over software‑based encryption approaches, SemiFive says.

The ASIC will be developed using Samsung Foundry’s 8nm Low Power Ultimate (8LPU) process technology, with SemiFive providing turnkey services that include design, packaging, testing and supply chain management to accelerate commercialisation.

"Encrypted computation will become inevitable," said Kevin Yoder, CEO of Niobium, in the press release. "Once enterprises can compute directly on encrypted data at fast enough speeds, processing sensitive information in the clear will no longer be acceptable. With SemiFive and Samsung Foundry, we're translating years of R&D into production-ready silicon for encrypted cloud and AI environments. This represents the next step in our transition from prototype systems to accelerators suitable for customer deployments."

SemiFive said the contract reinforces its position as a design partner for global innovators across the advanced ASIC sector.