Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, and NAVER Corporation, a global internet company with top-notch AI technology, today announced a wide-reaching collaboration to develop semiconductor solutions tailored for hyperscale artificial intelligence (AI) models. Leveraging Samsung’s next-generation memory technologies like computational storage, processing-in-memory (PIM) and processing-near-memory (PNM), as well as Compute Express Link (CXL), the companies intend to pool their hardware and software resources to dramatically accelerate the handling of massive AI workloads.

Recent advances in hyperscale AI have led to an exponential growth in data volumes that need to be processed. However, the performance and efficiency limitations of current computing systems pose significant challenges in meeting these heavy computational requirements, fueling the need for new AI-optimized semiconductor solutions.

Developing such solutions requires an extensive convergence of semiconductor and AI disciplines. Samsung is combining its semiconductor design and manufacturing expertise with NAVER’s experience in the development and verification of AI algorithms and AI-driven services, to create solutions that take the performance and power efficiency of large-scale AI to a new level.

For years, Samsung has been introducing memory and storage that support high-speed data processing in AI applications, from computational storage (SmartSSD) and PIM-enabled high bandwidth memory (HBM-PIM) to next-generation memory supporting the Compute Express Link (CXL) interface. Samsung will now join with NAVER to optimize these memory technologies in advancing large-scale AI systems.

NAVER will continue to refine HyperCLOVA, a hyperscale language model with over 200 billion parameters, while improving its compression algorithms to create a more simplified model that significantly increases computation efficiency.

“Through our collaboration with NAVER, we will develop cutting-edge semiconductor solutions to solve the memory bottleneck in large-scale AI systems,” said Jinman Han, Executive Vice President of Memory Global Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “With tailored solutions that reflect the most pressing needs of AI service providers and users, we are committed to broadening our market-leading memory lineup including computational storage, PIM and more, to fully accommodate the ever-increasing scale of data.”

“Combining our acquired knowledge and know-how from HyperCLOVA with Samsung’s semiconductor manufacturing prowess, we believe we can create an entirely new class of solutions that can better tackle the challenges of today’s AI technologies,” said Suk Geun Chung, Head of NAVER CLOVA CIC. “We look forward to broadening our AI capabilities and bolstering our edge in AI competitiveness through this strategic partnership.”

The achievement was based on Samsung’s restored financial performance, which is now near pre-pandemic levels, and higher demand for memory due to an increase in data usage. In 2021, Samsung scored a brand value growth of 20% compared to 2020 and this year, continues the double-digit growth. Samsung first entered the top 10 list in 2012, placing in ninth position, and has managed to rise in the chart each year, reaching sixth place in 2017 and fifth place in 2020.

“Samsung Electronics was able to record two consecutive years of double-digit growth in brand value, all thanks to the support from our global customers,” said YH Lee, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung Electronics. “In return, the entire company will work together as a team to provide a better and more satisfying customer experience.”

Various Factors Evaluated by Interbrand To Build the Samsung Brand Value

At the end of 2021, Samsung Electronics merged its SET Division and created the Device eXperience Division to increase synergy among its products and provide a next level of experience to customers. Furthermore, Samsung also launched the Customer eXperience-Multi Device Experience Center to strengthen its multi-device connection experience.

Along with these measures, Samsung has integrated the SmartThings across its product categories, creating an inclusive ecosystem and a multi-device experience. SmartThings also empowers consumers to get the most out of their Samsung devices, as well as third-party products they may already own.

In addition, Samsung’s Future Generation Lab has been created to foster authentic conversations around the activities of the next generation. The insights from the lab have been applied to the products and marketing activities.

As well as innovative products based on consumer experiences, the development of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, automotive and robotics through consistent investment also played a role in Samsung’s growth.

Samsung’s Recognized Efforts in Each Product Division for a Better Customer Experience

Mobile

• Camera innovation of Galaxy S22 series based on customers’ insights, and Nightography campaign rollout Cementing leadership in the foldable mobile phone category
• Partnership with Google and Microsoft to strengthen users’ connected experience
• Respecting the value of user security and privacy through Samsung Knox

Network

• Pioneering network innovation path in virtualization and openness with large-scale commercial experiences
• Driving 5G industry with its market-leading 5G portfolio from RAN and Core to automation tools
• Realizing the ESG commitment through intelligent network solutions for energy efficiency

Visual Display

• Continuing innovation of premium TVs, including Micro LED, the Neo QLED 8K/4K
• Strengthening its product portfolio based on customers’ lifestyle, such as The Frame, The Freestyle
• Providing new gaming experiences to consumers, including the Samsung Gaming Hub and the Odyssey Ark

Home Appliances

• Expanding Bespoke product categories beyond kitchen to entire home including clothing care, floor care and air care
• Delivering sustainability values through its products (achieving high level of energy saving rate for major products, guaranteed warranties for digital inverter compressor, reduced microplastic emission from washing machines in collaboration with Patagonia)
• Creating excitement among Bespoke fans through participation-focused online and offline campaigns

Semiconductor

• Investing in next-generation technologies and production capabilities to ensure stable supplies for cutting-edge applications (constructing new $17B manufacturing line in Texas, KRW 20-trillion R&D complex in Giheung)
• Delivering industry-leading semiconductor innovations that enhance product performance and energy efficiency (industry’s first 3nm GAA mass production)
• Developing innovative memory solutions to address the explosive growth of data-intensive tasks in areas such as AI and ML (CXL memory, HBM-PIM, second-generation SmartSSD), and expanding strategic partnerships to tackle new industry challenges
• Pushing boundaries of logic solutions that can offer enhanced user experiences and new opportunities (5G Exynos Modem, Exynos 2200, 200MP ISOCELL HP3)

Interbrand’s Best Global Brands are listed according to the evaluation of each brand value, which is a result of comprehensive analysis of the financial performance of the company, the influence of the brand on customer purchases and brand competitiveness.

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.

Kwangil Park, senior vice president of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics stated, “Our groundbreaking HBM-PIM is the industry’s first programmable PIM solution tailored for diverse AI-driven workloads such as HPC, training and inference. We plan to build upon this breakthrough by further collaborating with AI solution providers for even more advanced PIM-powered applications.”

Rick Stevens, Argonne’s Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences commented, “I’m delighted to see that Samsung is addressing the memory bandwidth/power challenges for HPC and AI computing. HBM-PIM design has demonstrated impressive performance and power gains on important classes of AI applications, so we look forward to working together to evaluate its performance on additional problems of interest to Argonne National Laboratory.”

Most of today’s computing systems are based on the von Neumann architecture, which uses separate processor and memory units to carry out millions of intricate data processing tasks. This sequential processing approach requires data to constantly move back and forth, resulting in a system-slowing bottleneck especially when handling ever-increasing volumes of data.

Instead, the HBM-PIM brings processing power directly to where the data is stored by placing a DRAM-optimized AI engine inside each memory bank — a storage sub-unit — enabling parallel processing and minimizing data movement. When applied to Samsung’s existing HBM2 Aquabolt solution, the new architecture is able to deliver over twice the system performance while reducing energy consumption by more than 70%. The HBM-PIM also does not require any hardware or software changes, allowing faster integration into existing systems.

Samsung’s paper on the HBM-PIM has been selected for presentation at the renowned International Solid-State Circuits Virtual Conference (ISSCC) held through Feb. 22. Samsung’s HBM-PIM is now being tested inside AI accelerators by leading AI solution partners, with all validations expected to be completed within the first half of this year.