Southeast Asia’s semiconductor story is no longer limited to assembly, testing and outsourced manufacturing. This list points to a region, led largely by Singapore and Malaysia, that is building more of the stack itself: custom ASICs, silicon IP, chiplet packaging, photonics, test equipment and fab services.
Some of these startups are tackling narrow but essential problems, such as radiation-hardened chips, RF test components and FPGA design software. Others are pushing local industry further upstream into design and advanced packaging.
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Taken together, they suggest a semiconductor ecosystem that is becoming more specialised, more technical and less reliant on being the backend of someone else’s supply chain.
GreatAsic Technology
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Malaysian fabless chip designer building custom ASICs and AI SoCs for inference, automotive and IoT applications. | Ong Chin Hu and Michael Liew Woon Chin | 2024 |
FusionAP
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Malaysian startup focused on advanced semiconductor packaging, including chiplet and heterogeneous integration for next-generation chips. | Teng Chow Ooi and Peter Chavart | 2025 |
Silicon Box
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore-based packaging company developing chiplet-based solutions for AI, automotive, data centre and mobile computing workloads. | Dr. Byung Joon (BJ) Han, Dr. Sehat Sutardja, and Weili Dai | 2021 |
Zero-Error Systems (ZES)
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore company making radiation-hardened ICs for space and other safety-critical environments where reliability is central. | Dr. Wei Shu, Joseph Sylvester Chang, and Arun Mittal | 2019 |
SkyeChip
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Malaysian IC design firm developing silicon IP and custom ASICs for AI, HPC and data centre applications. | Dato’ Fong Swee Kiang and Teh Chee Hak | 2019 |
Global TechSolutions (GTS)
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore semiconductor services company that refurbishes and upgrades front-end fab equipment to reduce downtime and extend tool life. | Kenneth Lee Wee Ching | 2011 |
Swift Bridge Technologies
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Malaysian company making ultra-high-frequency RF cables used in semiconductor test and measurement systems. | SK Chong | 2012 |
Infinecs Systems
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Malaysian engineering company focused on IC and SoC design, embedded systems and prototyping across advanced semiconductor applications. | Kalai Selvan Subramaniam and Sreejith Sukumaran | 2016 |
MaiStorage
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Malaysian Phison-owned company developing NAND controller ICs and storage modules for AI, automotive and data centre use cases. | Dato’ Pua Khein Seng | 2024 |
Oppstar
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Malaysian IC design company and the country’s first listed player in the segment, marking a shift towards frontend chip work. | Hun Wah Cheah, Meng Thai Ng, and Chun Chiat Tan | 2014 |
LightSpeed Photonics
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore startup developing silicon photonics processors and interconnects aimed at bandwidth and power bottlenecks in computing. | Dr. Rohin Y and Ramana Pamidighantam | 2021 |
Core Semiconductor
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore company providing SoC and ASIC IP for IoT, built around an open-architecture CPU core and hardware platform. | Jeff Dionne and Jeff Garzik | 2018 |
Cloptech
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore fabless chip company developing 60GHz wireless solutions for high-speed data transfer and networking. | Albert Chai | 2015 |
Plunify
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore EDA software firm using machine learning to improve FPGA design flows without changing source code. | HarnHua Ng and Kirvy Teo | 2009 |
Divergent Technologies
| Profile | Founder(s) | Founding year |
| Singapore-based semiconductor services firm supplying test systems, probing solutions and operational support across Asia Pacific. | Kevin Czinger and Lucas Czinger | 2014 |
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