The company is expanding beyond conventional chip-design services, building turnkey silicon capabilities and using RISC-V-based work as a proof point for its ambitions.
SignOff Semiconductor is preparing for a larger role in the custom-silicon market, building on its established VLSI design-services business to take on a greater share of the journey from chip architecture to silicon. The company is not moving away from design services; instead, it is adding turnkey capabilities aimed at customers that increasingly want a single engineering partner for more of the chip-development process.
In an interaction with EFY at Semicon India, Rakesh Trivedi, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, SignOff Semiconductor said This shift reflects a change in the semiconductor customer base. Alongside traditional fabless companies, technology companies, automotive players, hyperscalers and startups are increasingly pursuing custom silicon. Many of these companies may have the architecture or product requirement but need specialist partners to help turn that concept into a manufacturable chip. They see this as an important emerging opportunity.
The company has been building its turnkey capability for around three years. Rather than treating it as a separate business overnight, SignOff has been investing progressively in the ecosystem, infrastructure and engineering talent needed to support such programmes. It has established relationships across the foundry and OSAT ecosystem, invested in EDA capabilities and brought in people with experience of delivering silicon programmes. SignOff says the early results are encouraging, with healthy growth in its turnkey business over the past year. While it does not disclose a specific percentage, the company expects turnkey engagements to represent a significant share of its business over the next few years.
One of the more revealing parts of this transition is SignOff’s work around RISC-V. But the company’s RISC-V strategy is not about suddenly becoming a processor vendor. They have developed the Kaveri platform as soft IP to demonstrate a different capability: that it can work with an open processor architecture, customise the underlying RTL and build additional functionality around it for different applications. The company has already demonstrated several applications using the platform.
The strategic value of Kaveri lies in what it demonstrates to a potential customer. SignOff is trying to establish that its role can extend beyond executing a specific design task. When a customer approaches with an architecture or silicon concept, SignOff wants to demonstrate that it can understand and contribute across the broader path toward implementation and eventual silicon. That is why RISC-V becomes relevant to the turnkey strategy. Kaveri acts as a proof of capability. It gives SignOff something it has built itself that can demonstrate its ability to move from architecture-level thinking into customisable RTL and toward the subsequent stages of chip realisation.
Importantly, the company says it is not entering the product business with Kaveri. The platform is being used to showcase its silicon-development capabilities and strengthen conversations with customers considering turnkey engagements. In that sense, the RISC-V initiative is less about selling a processor and more about proving that SignOff can be a partner for customers looking to build their own silicon. The move comes as customer expectations from design partners are also changing. SignOff says customers increasingly want broader design-cycle knowledge, faster execution and greater flexibility, while AI-enabled engineering is beginning to influence how semiconductor teams are being built.
For SignOff, this points toward a model where engineering depth matters more than simply the number of resources a company can provide. The company says it has traditionally focused on strategic projects rather than staff augmentation and continues to position itself as a pure-play semiconductor engineering organisation. Its ambition now is broader: to become a trusted partner for silicon rollouts and increasingly participate in the strategic, technically demanding work that sits between a customer’s chip idea and finished silicon.
The RISC-V work, the investments behind the turnkey business and the company’s expanding ecosystem relationships offer an early indication of how SignOff is preparing for that role. What exactly is being built around Kaveri, where is the company putting its next investments, and what kind of custom-silicon programmes is it preparing to take on? Those are the details that will reveal how far SignOff’s move from design partner toward silicon partner can actually go. Stay tuned to know further.
