ucie
(9)
Global Unichip Corporation (GUC)
The Taiwanese design house that quietly builds other people's AI chips - and reserved 60,000 CoWoS wafers to keep doing it.
SkyeChip
SkyeChip is a Penang-based fabless semiconductor company that designs silicon intellectual property (IP) and custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Founded in 2019 by former Intel, Altera and Broadcom engineers, it specialises in advanced memory-interface IP (HBM3E, DDR5, LPDDR5/5x), UCIe die-to-die interconnect, network-on-chip fabrics and RISC-V CPU IP built on 6nm/7nm process nodes. Recognised as Malaysia's first homegrown AI chip designer, SkyeChip listed on Bursa Malaysia's Main Market in May 2026 in the country's largest IPO in 16 years.
ForwardEdge ASIC
ForwardEdge ASIC is a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based integrated circuit design house and wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. It designs 100% domestically traceable custom ASICs and FPGAs - plus silicon IP and turnkey products - for defense, aerospace, space, cybersecurity, and commercial customers. Built by a team of veteran engineers who have worked together for more than 30 years, the company pairs startup speed with Fortune 100 stability and holds DMEA Trusted IC vendor status, positioning it as a secure onshore alternative for mission-critical microelectronics.
Ayar Labs
Ayar Labs is a San Jose-based semiconductor company building optical input/output (I/O) technology that moves data between chips using light instead of copper. Its silicon-photonics chiplets - the TeraPHY optical engine and the SuperNova multi-wavelength light source - are designed to be co-packaged directly with GPUs and other processors, letting AI and high-performance-computing systems scale across thousands of accelerators with far higher bandwidth and far lower power than electrical interconnects. Spun out of a DARPA-funded university research effort, the company raised a $500M Series E in 2026 with backing from NVIDIA and AMD.
eTopus Technology
eTopus Technology is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company that designs ultra-high-speed, ADC/DSP-based SerDes and die-to-die interconnect IP for data centers, high-performance computing, AI, 5G and storage. Founded in 2012 by Harry Chan and Peter Kou, the company licenses silicon-proven PHY IP - spanning 112G on advanced 6/7nm nodes down to 22nm - plus chiplet interfaces supporting UCIe, Bunch of Wires, PCIe Gen 5/6 and CXL. eTopus positions itself on low latency and low power, and has built collaborative chiplet platforms with partners including QuickLogic, OpenFive and CoMira.
Grovf
Grovf is a deep-tech semiconductor startup building AI infrastructure backend networking - RDMA and chiplet IP, soft IP cores, and scale-out NICs that connect AI accelerator servers at 400/800Gbps with sub-2-microsecond latency. Founded in 2017 in Armenia by Artavazd Khachatryan and Khachik Sahakyan, the company began with FPGA-accelerated databases for the Industrial IoT and evolved into networking fabric for large-scale AI model training. Grovf was the first company from Armenia and the Caucasus to win an EU Horizon 2020 SME Instrument grant, and went through UC Berkeley's SkyDeck accelerator.
Khachik Sahakyan
Khachik Sahakyan is the co-founder and CEO of Grovf, a deep-tech hardware company building AI back-end fabric IP, chiplets and 400/800 Gbps SmartNICs that move data between AI accelerators with sub-2 microsecond RDMA latency. A microwave engineer and former Yerevan State University lecturer turned founder, he splits Grovf between Newark, California and Yerevan, Armenia, and has spent the last several years convincing data-center buyers that the path to scale is in silicon, not software.
DreamBig Semiconductor Inc.
DreamBig Semiconductor is a San Jose-based chiplet company building open silicon platforms that scale AI networking from 800 Gbps to 12.8 Tbps. Founded by Marvell veterans, the team is selling chiplets, a SuperNIC, and a chiplet hub aimed at AI data centers, automotive, and edge compute.
Sohail Syed
Sohail Syed is the CEO, President, and co-founder of DreamBig Semiconductor, a San Jose-based fabless chip startup he built into a chiplet platform pioneer before its $265M acquisition by Arm in October 2025. A serial entrepreneur from Pakistan who attended NED University and later earned an MBA from Cornell, Syed previously founded Questarium (acquired by Marvell) and FIRQuest (acquired by Corigine), and at Marvell helped grow a network switches business to $4 billion in revenue across 10 successful chip tapeouts. DreamBig's MARS Open Chiplet Platform - unveiled at CES 2024 - democratizes silicon development for AI, data centers, automotive, and edge computing, and the company raised $75M in a Samsung-led Series B in July 2024 before the Arm deal closed.