This year’s event, attended by more than 800 customers and partners, featured presentations from Samsung’s Memory and System LSI business leaders — including Jung-bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business; Yong-In Park, President and Head of System LSI Business; and Jaeheon Jeong, Executive Vice President and Head of Device Solutions (DS) Americas Office — on the company’s latest advancements and its vision for the future.

System LSI Business Highlights

In the morning session of this year’s Tech Day, the System LSI Business emphasized its goal of becoming a ‘total solution fabless’ through maximizing the synergy between its unique and wide-range product lineup. As Samsung Electronics’ fabless IC design house, the System LSI Business currently offers around 900 products, which include SoC (System on Chip), image sensor, modem, display driver IC (DDI), power management IC (PMIC) and security solutions.

The System LSI Business not only makes leading individual products, but is also a total solution provider that can merge the various logic technologies into one platform, in order to deliver optimized solutions to customers.

“In an age that requires machines to learn and think as people do, the importance of logic chips, which play the roles of the brain, heart, nervous system and eyes, is growing to unprecedented levels,” said Yong-In Park, President and Head of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will converge and combine its technology embedded in various products like SoC, sensor, DDI and modem, in order to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a total solution provider.”

▲ Yong-In Park, President and Head of System LSI Business, is giving his keynote speech at Samsung Tech Day 2022.

A Vision of Chips With Human-Like Performance

The Fourth Industrial Revolution was a key theme in System LSI’s Tech Day sessions. The System LSI Business’ logic chips are crucial physical foundations of Hyper-Intelligence, Hyper-Connectivity and Hyper-Data, which are the key areas of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Samsung Electronics aims to enhance the performance of these chips to a level at which they can carry out human tasks just as well as people can.

With this vision in mind, the System LSI Business is focusing on improving the performance of its essential IP like NPU (Neural Processing Unit) and modem, as well as innovating CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology by collaborating with global industry leading companies.

The System LSI Business is also continuing its work on ultra-high resolution image sensors so that its chips can capture images as the human eye does, and also has plans for sensors that can play the role of all five of the human senses.

Next-Generation Logic Chips Showcased

Samsung Electronics revealed a number of advanced logic chip technology for the first time at the Tech Day booth, including 5G Exynos Modem 5300, Exynos Auto V920 and QD OLED DDI, which are essential parts of various industries such as mobile, home appliance and automotive.

Chips that were newly released or announced this year including the premium mobile processor Exynos 2200 were also on display, along with the 200MP ISOCELL HP3 — the image sensor with the industry’s smallest 0.56-micrometer (μm)-pixels. Built on the most advanced 4-nanometer (nm) EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) process and combined with cutting-edge mobile, GPU and NPU technology, the Exynos 2200 provides the finest experience for smartphone users. The ISOCELL HP3, with a 12 percent smaller pixel size than the predecessor’s 0.64μm, can enable an approximately 20 percent reduction in camera module surface area, allowing smartphone manufacturers to keep their premium devices slim.

Samsung showcased its ISOCELL HP3 in action by showing the attendees of Tech Day the picture quality of photographs taken with a 200MP sensor camera, as well as demonstrating the workings of System LSI’s fingerprint security IC for biometric payment cards that combines a fingerprint sensor, Secure Element (SE) and Secure Processor, adding an extra layer of authentication and security in payment cards.

Memory Business Highlights

In a year marking 30 years and 20 years of leadership in DRAM and NAND flash memory respectively, Samsung unveiled its fifth-generation 10nm-class (1b) DRAM as well as eighth- and ninth-generation Vertical NAND (V-NAND), affirming the company’s commitment to continue providing the most powerful combination of memory technologies over the next decade.

Samsung also emphasized how the company will demonstrate greater resilience through collaborative partnerships in the face of new industry challenges.

“One trillion gigabytes is the total amount of memory Samsung has made since its beginning over 40 years ago. About half of that trillion was produced in the last three years alone, indicating just how fast digital transformation is progressing,” said Jung-bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business at Samsung Electronics. “As advances in memory bandwidth, capacity and power efficiency enable new platforms and these, in turn, stimulate more semiconductor innovations, we will increasingly push for a higher level of integration on the journey toward digital coevolution.”

▲ Jung-bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business, is giving his keynote speech at Samsung Tech Day 2022.

DRAM Solutions to Advance Data Intelligence

Samsung’s 1b DRAM is currently under development with plans for mass production in 2023. To overcome challenges in DRAM scaling beyond the 10nm range, the company has been developing disruptive solutions in patterning, materials and architecture, with technology like High-K material well underway.

The company then highlighted upcoming DRAM solutions such as 32Gb DDR5 DRAM, 8.5Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM and 36Gbps GDDR7 DRAM that will bring new capabilities to data center, HPC, mobile, gaming and automotive market segments.

Expanding beyond conventional DRAM, Samsung also underscored the importance of tailored DRAM solutions such as HBM-PIM, AXDIMM and CXL that can fuel system-level innovation in better handling the explosive growth of data worldwide.

1,000+ V-NAND Layers by 2030

Since its inception a decade ago, Samsung’s V-NAND technology has progressed through eight generations, bringing 10 times the layer count and 15 times the bit growth. Samsung’s most recent, 512Gb eighth-generation V-NAND features a bit density improvement of 42%, attaining the industry’s highest bit density among 512Gb triple-level cell (TLC) memory products to date. The world’s highest capacity 1Tb TLC V-NAND will be available to customers by the end of the year.

The company also noted that its ninth-generation V-NAND is under development and slated for mass production in 2024. By 2030, Samsung envisions stacking over 1,000 layers to better enable data-intensive technologies of the future.

As AI and big data applications drive the need for faster and higher-capacity memory, Samsung will continue to leapfrog bit density by accelerating the transition to quad-level cell (QLC), while further enhancing power efficiency in support of more sustainable customer operations worldwide.

More Far-Reaching Solutions Amidst Greater Collaboration

Samsung introduced an extensive portfolio of storage solutions spanning data center, enterprise server, mobile, client, consumer and automotive applications. The company highlighted its high-performance, low-power computational storage optimized for AI and how it can contribute to eco-conscious computing. Samsung also presented a new DRAM-less SSD, the PM9C1a, which supports both PCIe 4.0 and 5.0.

Samsung then shared aggressive plans to lead the industry in intelligent mobility solutions. The company discussed its wide-ranging memory offerings designed for every modern automotive function, from in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), autonomous driving (AD) and advanced driver assisted systems (ADAS), clusters and gateways to telematics. Since entering the automotive memory market in 2015, Samsung has been rapidly growing its market presence with the intent of becoming the largest automotive memory provider by 2025.

Reaffirming its overriding goals of enhancing customer value and pursuing a customer-oriented development philosophy, Samsung stressed its intent to further expand its ecosystem partnerships. To stimulate more widespread open innovation, Samsung revealed a key element of its blueprint for greater customer collaboration. The company will open a Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) where customers and partners can test and verify Samsung memory and software solutions in various server environments. Beginning with the opening of its first SMRC in Korea in the fourth quarter of this year, Samsung plans to later launch additional hubs in the U.S. and around the world, in collaboration with ecosystem partners like Red Hat and Google Cloud.

First Integration of HBM-PIM Into an AI Accelerator

In February, Samsung introduced the industry’s first HBM-PIM (Aquabolt-XL), which incorporates the AI processing function into Samsung’s HBM2 Aquabolt, to enhance high-speed data processing in supercomputers and AI applications. The HBM-PIM has since been tested in the Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale+ (Alveo) AI accelerator, where it delivered an almost 2.5X system performance gain as well as more than a 60% cut in energy consumption.

“HBM-PIM is the industry’s first AI-tailored memory solution being tested in customer AI-accelerator systems, demonstrating tremendous commercial potential,” said Nam Sung Kim, senior vice president of DRAM Product & Technology at Samsung Electronics. “Through standardization of the technology, applications will become numerous, expanding into HBM3 for next-generation supercomputers and AI applications, and even into mobile memory for on-device AI as well as for memory modules used in data centers.”

“Xilinx has been collaborating with Samsung Electronics to enable high-performance solutions for data center, networking and real-time signal processing applications starting with the Virtex UltraScale+ HBM family, and recently introduced our new and exciting Versal HBM series products,” said Arun Varadarajan Rajagopal, senior director, Product Planning at Xilinx, Inc. “We are delighted to continue this collaboration with Samsung as we help to evaluate HBM-PIM systems for their potential to achieve major performance and energy-efficiency gains in AI applications.”

DRAM Modules Powered by PIM

The Acceleration DIMM (AXDIMM) brings processing to the DRAM module itself, minimizing large data movement between the CPU and DRAM to boost the energy efficiency of AI accelerator systems. With an AI engine built inside the buffer chip, the AXDIMM can perform parallel processing of multiple memory ranks (sets of DRAM chips) instead of accessing just one rank at a time, greatly enhancing system performance and efficiency. Since the module can retain its traditional DIMM form factor, the AXDIMM facilitates drop-in replacement without requiring system modifications. Currently being tested on customer servers, the AXDIMM can offer approximately twice the performance in AI-based recommendation applications and a 40% decrease in system-wide energy usage.

“SAP has been continuously collaborating with Samsung on their new and emerging memory technologies to deliver optimal performance on SAP HANA and help database acceleration,” said Oliver Rebholz, head of HANA core research & innovation at SAP. “Based on performance projections and potential integration scenarios, we expect significant performance improvements for in-memory database management system (IMDBMS) and higher energy efficiency via disaggregated computing on AXDIMM. SAP is looking to continue its collaboration with Samsung in this area.”

Mobile Memory That Brings AI From Data Center to Device

Samsung’s LPDDR5-PIM mobile memory technology can provide independent AI capabilities without data center connectivity. Simulation tests have shown that the LPDDR5-PIM can more than double performance while reducing energy usage by over 60% when used in applications such as voice recognition, translation and chatbot.

Energizing the Ecosystem

Samsung plans to expand its AI memory portfolio by working with other industry leaders to complete standardization of the PIM platform in the first half of 2022. The company will also continue to foster a highly robust PIM ecosystem in assuring wide applicability across the memory market.

In a keynote speech at the 2021 Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Memory+ Conference, Jinman Han, Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Global Sales and Marketing at Samsung Electronics, proclaimed that Samsung was ready to work with the entire industry to develop next-generation memory solutions that will be needed in the near future. The GSA Memory+ Conference is the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s premier event, which brings the global memory, logic and system design communities together to discuss advancing memory and system architectures.

The memory industry has long focused its efforts on satisfying demand for larger capacities and faster speeds, as well as higher bandwidth. However, in order to keep up with growing demand, the industry will need to look beyond individual innovations and assess the bigger picture. Samsung is committed to collaborating with the industry in this area and intends to lead the development of next-generation solutions.

The massive and ongoing rise in data has exposed a need for revolutionary change in memory computation and subsystems. In response, Samsung has been leading the development of technologies that can be used to give existing system architectures a much-needed update, including HBM-PIM, AXDIMM, Smart SSDs and CXL-based DRAM.

Having been the first in the memory industry to utilize EUV and HKMG process technology, Samsung is uniquely positioned to introduce in a new era of powerful memory innovations. The company has been optimizing thermal performance by advancing innovations like Hybrid Copper Bonding (HCB), while its V-NAND technologies continue to redefine how memory is stacked.

“I believe our industry will rise to this challenge not by innovating independently, but by finding solutions together,” said Han. “Going forward, we’ll develop a new IT ecosystem together that is much more powerful and sustainable, one which will be needed to architect the digital future.”

Click on the video below to watch the keynote.