IN Brief:
- First-half revenue reached KRW94.7 billion, with SEMIFIVE reporting 97% year-on-year growth.
- Mass-production bookings reached KRW42.3 billion, almost twice the company’s entire 2025 level.
- Advanced-node mixed-signal IP and turnkey ASIC work are increasingly tied to AI and data-centre customers.
SEMIFIVE has reported a sharp increase in first-half revenue and manufacturing bookings as more custom ASIC programmes move beyond design work and into repeated silicon production.
The South Korean company recorded consolidated first-half revenue of KRW94.7 billion and bookings of KRW118.9 billion. Revenue increased 97% year on year, while the six-month figure represents 78% of the revenue SEMIFIVE generated across the whole of 2025.
The production figures provide the more useful measure of its development. SEMIFIVE operates a turnkey ASIC model spanning chip specification, IP selection, logic design, physical implementation, packaging, test, software, and manufacturing support, leaving customers with fewer separate engineering and supply-chain interfaces to manage.
ASIC development generated KRW54.1 billion of first-half revenue, more than doubling year on year. The company says a growing proportion of demand now comes from OEMs and service providers that previously bought standard devices but want silicon optimised around their own compute, power, or system requirements.
That customer group presents a different engineering problem from an established fabless semiconductor business. An equipment manufacturer may understand its application and workload in considerable detail without maintaining internal teams for physical design, process integration, packaging, design-for-test, or foundry management.
A turnkey provider has to bridge that gap without treating tape-out as the end of the project. Device specifications need to reflect a viable process and package, test structures have to be built into the design, and manufacturing decisions made before tape-out can determine whether a technically functional chip later reaches acceptable yield and cost.
SEMIFIVE’s mass-production bookings reached KRW42.3 billion in the first half, almost twice the KRW21.2 billion recorded for the whole of 2025. Quarterly production bookings increased from KRW15.6 billion in the first quarter to KRW26.7 billion in the second.
Overseas customers accounted for about 45% of second-quarter production bookings, equivalent to KRW12.1 billion. That gives the company a broader manufacturing pipeline than one dependent largely on South Korean design projects and suggests that overseas programmes are beginning to progress from engineering into wafer, packaging, and test orders.
The distinction matters commercially because design and production create different revenue patterns. A development programme is built around engineering milestones and a relatively finite path to tape-out, whereas successful production can continue throughout the customer product’s commercial life.
SEMIFIVE says its manufacturing model includes exclusive production rights linked to customer mask sets. That gives it an opportunity to remain involved after qualification when customers place subsequent production orders, although the eventual value still depends on the volume and longevity of the finished device.
The company’s IP business is also becoming a larger contributor. Analog Bits generated first-half revenue of KRW32.5 billion, already above its KRW30.5 billion total for the whole of 2025, with bookings of KRW32.1 billion.
Analog and mixed-signal IP occupies an important position inside advanced AI ASICs because not every circuit benefits equally from shrinking digital process geometries. Clocking, power management, interfaces, and other analogue functions still have to operate across voltage, temperature, noise, and manufacturing variation while fitting inside increasingly constrained advanced-node designs.
SEMIFIVE says revenue from 2nm and 3nm IP is increasing. Analog Bits also develops custom blocks for individual data-centre customers before adding silicon-proven designs to a portfolio that can subsequently be licensed into other projects.
That model turns some customer-funded engineering into reusable IP, potentially shortening later schedules where the block is appropriate to the target process and application. It also creates a recurring revenue stream that is less directly tied to the number of engineers assigned to one new design.
The increased volume is beginning to affect margins. SEMIFIVE says first-half gross margin rose from 11.9% a year earlier to 30.6%, while operating margin improved by 47 percentage points to minus 11.5%. The business therefore remains loss-making at operating level, but the improvement provides some evidence that production and reusable IP can scale differently from project-by-project engineering work.
Follow-on production orders cover vision AI, on-device AI, and data-centre chips, while the company is also seeing demand for new projects using 3D-IC technology. Those applications place additional pressure on packaging, memory interfaces, power delivery, and thermal management alongside the design of the compute die itself.
Custom silicon remains an expensive route for customers. Non-recurring engineering, verification, masks, packaging, and qualification make architectural mistakes costly, and anticipated production volumes have to justify the development spend before a bespoke chip makes economic sense.
SEMIFIVE’s first-half figures nevertheless show more customers passing the point at which custom silicon is merely a design project. Rising production bookings mean those chips are entering manufacturing in greater numbers — the stage where an ASIC provider has to prove that its engineering process can support yield, supply continuity, and repeated delivery as well as a successful first tape-out.
