DeepX wins Hong Daeyong Award at 2026 Patent Technology Awards for AI accelerator technology

DeepX, an ultra-low-power AI chipmaker, said Wednesday it won the Hong Daeyong Award at the 2026 Patent Technology Awards, hosted by the Korean Intellectual Property Office, for its patent on a "pipeline-structured arithmetic acceleration device for artificial neural networks."

The patent reduces the storage and movement of intermediate data generated during AI computation, boosting both processing speed and power efficiency.

The technology delivers a 12-fold improvement in computational performance and cuts the memory required to store intermediate data to 1/340th of conventional levels under a batch size of 1,024.

The patent traces its roots to research on deep learning accelerators — the technology that inspired the company's name when it was founded in 2018.

DeepX filed the technology as a patent that same year, and the award came five years after the patent was registered in 2021.

Since its founding, DeepX has focused on securing core AI semiconductor technology, filing a total of 606 patents and registering 186. The United States leads in registered patents by country with 95, followed by South Korea with 67.

In a 2024 Forbes tally of publicly filed NPU patents in the United States, DeepX recorded 34 — more than major global chipmakers including Qualcomm (22), Arm (20), Nvidia (19) and Intel (17).

The company's 600th patent filing relates to DX-Newton, a robotics software integration technology. DX-Newton allows developers to retain an Nvidia Isaac-based robot development environment while switching only the AI inference acceleration component to a DeepX NPU.

DeepX began mass production of its first-generation AI semiconductor, the DX-M1, last year and secured 88 purchase orders from more than 10 countries worldwide in roughly a year.

Meanwhile, DeepX's next-generation generative AI semiconductor, the DX-M2 — developed on Samsung Electronics' 2-nanometer process — won an Innovation Award in the AI category at CES 2027.

"This award is especially meaningful because it recognizes the value of the core AI semiconductor technology we have focused on since the company's earliest days," said Yoo Ha-jun, DeepX's director of intellectual property. "We will continue to demonstrate our technological competitiveness in the global physical AI semiconductor market through ongoing research and development and the expansion of our intellectual property portfolio."