KUALA LUMPUR (May 20): SkyeChip Bhd (KL:SKYECHIP) is still considering whether to accept the offer for design tokens from semiconductor software design company Arm Holdings plc.
The aim is to finalise the process before the year end, SkyeChip chief executive officer Datuk Fong Swee Kiang told reporters after the company’s listing ceremony on Wednesday. The company needs time to evaluate the terms and conditions due to the costs involved, he noted.
“We’re still working on some of the details with the government to ensure that both parties are aligned,” he said.
SkyeChip has been offered access to the Arm Flexible Access (AFA) platform, which allows a firm to experiment and test products without paying full licensing fees upfront, as well as the higher-tier Compute Subsystems (CSS) token to high-performance design systems for direct chip creation.
The letters of conditional approval for access to both CSS and AFA platforms were received in April under the government’s semiconductor initiative that involves a 10-year partnership worth US$250 million with the British firm.
“For CSS, since it's a very huge undertaking, we are putting a lot more due diligence inside our own operation to make sure that when we embark [on] a CSS journey, we see success in front of us,” he said.
SkyeChip will allocate about RM82 million from its initial public offering’s proceeds for the design and development of the high-performance central processing unit (CPU) platform if the company decides to take up the offer for CSS, according to its prospectus.
If SkyeChip decides against the offer, the proceeds of RM82 million will be redeployed towards the development of custom compute and artificial intelligence hardware accelerators, or towards pursuing alternative solutions for the high-performance platform.