<기사제목>Ministry of SMEs and Startups, Samsung Electronics, and 5 Promising Fabless Companies Including Damoatech Selected for Support (Comprehensive)

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups jointly held the 'Fabless Challenge,' an event to select and support promising semiconductor fabless (design-specialized) companies, on the 29th at the Korea Federation of SMEs DMC Tower in Seoul. Oh Ki-woong, Vice Minister of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups (third from the left), is taking a commemorative photo with the representatives of the selected companies.

Five companies?Gwanak Analog, Damoatech, Boss Semiconductor, Alpha Solutions, and Wonsemicon?have been selected as "Promising Fabless Startups" and will receive support from the government and Samsung Electronics.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups and Samsung Electronics held a Fabless Challenge event on the 29th at the Korea Federation of SMEs DMC Oval to award these companies. The Fabless Challenge is an event launched last year to strengthen the system semiconductor ecosystem and provide opportunities for fabless and foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) to grow together.

This year, starting with company recruitment on the 3rd of last month, five promising fabless startups were finally selected through step-by-step evaluations including expert document and presentation assessments. Samsung Electronics will support these five companies by giving priority access to foundry MPW manufacturing processes and process technologies, while the Ministry of SMEs and Startups will provide up to 100 million KRW in development costs per company. MPW (Multi-Project Wafer) is a method of developing products for prototypes or research purposes by placing multiple project chip designs on a single wafer.

Gwanak Analog plans to implement deep learning-based high-quality multilingual and speaker text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis on a single independent chip, and Damoatech is developing a moisture-resistant non-contact touch sensor module to prevent malfunctions caused by moisture during automobile operation. Oh Ki-woong, Vice Minister of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, stated, "For Korea's core industry, the semiconductor industry, to take another leap forward, nurturing system semiconductor, especially excellent fabless companies, is extremely urgent. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups will continue to make active efforts for the balanced development between fabless and foundry through fostering promising fabless companies and win-win cooperation."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.