The 'Fabless Challenge,' in which the government and Samsung Electronics cooperate to provide promising fabless companies with Samsung Electronics' foundry Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) process costs and opportunities to manufacture new products, is being held and is expected to contribute to fostering domestic fabless companies.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (Minister Lee Young) announced that it will promote the '2023 Fabless Challenge' to foster promising fabless startups and spread an atmosphere of mutual cooperation between large and small businesses, and will begin recruiting startups to participate starting July 3.

The 'Fabless Challenge' is a program in which the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and Samsung Electronics collaborate to provide promising fabless startups with costs for producing MPW (prototypes) and opportunities to produce new products.

It started in 2022, and following last year, we plan to select five startups again this year.

MPW (Multi-Project Wafer) is a product development method for prototypes or research purposes by placing multiple project chip designs on a single wafer.

The application is open to fabless startups with less than 10 years of experience that wish to use Samsung Electronics Foundry's MPW process. Starting with the recruitment of companies on July 3, final selections are scheduled to be made next month (August 2023) following a multi-stage evaluation process including document and presentation evaluations.

The finally selected companies will have priority access to Samsung Electronics Foundry's MPW manufacturing process and receive support for costs of up to 100 million won per company.

In addition, starting this year, selected companies can receive technical support from Samsung Electronics for each project to ensure the smooth production of MPW.

Lee Young Jang"Fostering promising fabless companies is more important than anything else for our country to secure competitiveness in the system semiconductor field," said the official. "We will continue to promote the nurturing of promising fabless startups and their global expansion through initiatives such as the Fabless Challenge and the Super-Gap Startup 1000+ Project."