Squire Mining – a Canadian manufacturer of mining chips – has revealed it is to partner with South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics.

Squire says it plans to design a cryptocurrency mining unit with Samsung, adding the Suwon-based firm will become its foundry partner.

According to a company press release, the team plans to “develop the company’s initial ASIC chip to mine Bitcoin and other associated cryptocurrencies” and, if successful, they would proceed into an “initial mass production test run of the ASIC chips by Samsung”.

ASICs?

ASICs (or application-specific integrated circuits) are custom microchips designed for a specific use. For crypto, they are usually chips built to run mining algorithms as efficiently as possible – SHA256 with Bitcoin or Scypt with Litecoin, for example.

The new agreement between Samsung and Squire demonstrates the intent of the South Korean firm to make waves in the mining sector and challenge dominant incumbents like Bitmain Technologies. Bitmain recently announced an initial public offering at a $14 billion valuation.

Not the only partnership

This isn’t the only mining partnership for Samsung. Earlier this year they also joined up with the cryptocurrency mining firm Halong Mining to assist it in building their ASIC chips. The Halong miner – Dragonmint T1 – is believed to be one of the most efficient 10nm chips in the industry.

Squire says it anticipates they will complete an FPGA prototype of the initial ASIC chip today.