South Korea's government-backed on-device-AI program has produced an unusual industrial line-up: LG Electronics tapped Seoul chip designer CoAsia SEMI to develop two ultra-low-power AI IoT system-on-chips for its next generation of smart home appliances, with Samsung Foundry — rather than LG's usual TSMC — manufacturing them.
A ₩31 billion sub-project inside a ₩800 billion national program
The tie-up sits under the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources' K-On-Device AI Semiconductor Technology Development initiative, a ~₩800 billion ($585 million) R&D program running through December 2030 across automotive, industrial, robotics, defense and consumer IoT. The CoAsia SEMI–LG sub-project carries its own ₩31 billion (~$22.7 million) budget with the same 2030 horizon and lists Hyundai Motor, Doosan Robotics, Daedong and Korea Aerospace Industries among its participating demand customers.
Always-on chips built to a Samsung process
LG will define the specifications; CoAsia SEMI, an official Samsung Foundry Design Solution Partner, will architect the chips against Samsung's cell libraries and IP flows, with engineers from sister fabless CoAsia NEXELL contributing. The engineering brief is a three-state always-on architecture — microwatt-scale sleep, event-triggered wakeup, brief NPU inference — that general-purpose smartphone-class silicon cannot deliver at appliance bill-of-materials cost. Once tape-out is complete on Samsung's process, future iterations rarely move: leakage optimization, cell libraries and power gating are foundry-specific.
Why it lands in the middle of Samsung Foundry's recovery
The manufacturing pivot is the deal's most quietly consequential piece. Samsung Foundry posted more than ₩2 trillion of operating losses in Q4 2024 alone as Qualcomm and other flagship customers migrated to TSMC amid 3-nm yield problems. Utilization has since climbed to 70–80%, with 2-nm yield around 60% and full-utilization guidance for the back half of 2026 driven by HBM4 base dies and a growing 4-nm and 5-nm order book. LG's chip volumes will be small in absolute terms, but the deal anchors a prestige domestic brand to Samsung Foundry through the same DSP mechanism the fab has been using to court mid-tier customers.
The consumer-facing half is ThinQ Claw at IFA 2026
LG unveiled its ThinQ Claw AI home ecosystem and an expanded AI Home platform at IFA 2026 in Berlin on the same day the chip deal was announced — a deliberate pairing that ties the silicon strategy to the ambient-AI-home vision. That places the CoAsia SEMI SoCs directly against custom smart-appliance silicon plans from Samsung's own device business and from Chinese white-goods rivals leaning on MediaTek and Apple-adjacent chipmakers.
Reporting based on coverage from Tech Times, The Elec, Sammobile and TrendForce.