Korea-China Joint R&D: New Edge AI Chip Successfully Taped Out with 8nm eMRAM Technology

South Korean chip design service firm SEMIFIVE and Chinese magnetic spin chip R&D company ICY Tech have collaborated to successfully tape out a new generation of edge AI chips. The chip uses Samsung Foundry's 8LPU process with eMRAM technology, marking a key milestone as Asia's first commercial deployment of 8nm eMRAM tech.

This chip adopts a PNM (near-memory processing) architecture to solve bandwidth bottlenecks in edge inference, supporting 2B models to run on the edge. As a non-volatile memory, eMRAM doesn't require regular refreshing, has smaller cell size, higher data density than SRAM, and can retain information for a long time.