Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the launch of ‘Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE) Cloud Design Platform (CDP)’ for fabless customers, in collaboration with Rescale, a leader in high performance computing (HPC) applications in the cloud.

The key highlight feature of Samsung foundry’s first SAFE Cloud Design Platform is that it provides a virtual environment to design chips in the cloud. By accessing this platform through the cloud, customers can immediately start designing at anytime and anywhere.

To maximize customers’ design convenience, SAFE CDP supports a very secure design condition that has verified with cloud companies. In addition, customers can utilize various Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools offered by multiple vendors such as Ansys, Cadence, Mentor, a Siemens business and Synopsys.

Gaonchips, one of Samsung Foundry’s Design Solution Partners, has already tested the SAFE CDP on its 14nm automotive project using Cadence’s Innovus Implementation System and has successfully reduced its design run-time by 30 percent compared to current on-premise execution.

“We expect that our innovative design platform co-developed in partnership with Rescale will play a crucial role for the fabless industry as it evolves into efficient cloud-based design environment,” said Jae-hong Park, executive vice president of Foundry Design Platform Development at Samsung Electronics. “We remain committed to our efforts to bolster the SAFE ecosystem and will continue to collaborate with our SAFE partners on developing innovative programs that will help deliver ease of use and greater design efficiency for customers.”

As designs move to advanced nodes and as transistor scaling occurs at each node, chip designs become more complex and computing power required for these designs have increased significantly, resulting in greater overhead time and cost to customers.

By adopting CDP, customers can reduce the burden of building their own server infrastructure, while flexibly utilizing additional computing power required for chip design and verification. Furthermore, they can take full advantage of Samsung’s diverse foundry ecosystem which includes EDA, intellectual property (IP), cloud, and design services offered by reputable partners.

“We are excited to be a partner of Samsung Foundry SAFE ecosystem,” said Joris Poort, founder and CEO of Rescale. “We share a common vision of a global design cloud platform that efficiently supports a broad ecosystem of technologies and services for EDA customers worldwide.”

To actively respond to the latest technology trends and lower the design barrier for developing competitive SoCs, Samsung launched the SAFE program in early 2018 and held the first SAFE Forum in the United States last year. More information on SAFE can be found here.

About Rescale
Rescale is the leader in enterprise big compute in the cloud. Rescale’s ScaleX^® multi-cloud platform, built on the most powerful high-performance computing infrastructure, seamlessly matches software applications with the best architecture in the cloud to run complex data processing and simulations. Rescale partners with the largest cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, providing services enterprise in automotive, aerospace, defense, and semiconductor industry. For more information on Rescale, visit www.rescale.com.

The new foundry line, which will focus on EUV-based 5 nanometer (nm) and below process technology, has just commenced construction this month and is expected to be in full operation in the second half of 2021. It will play a pivotal role as Samsung aims to expand the use of state-of-the-art process technologies across a myriad of current and next generation applications, including 5G, high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).

“This new production facility will expand Samsung’s manufacturing capabilities for sub-5nm process and enable us to rapidly respond to the increasing demand for EUV-based solutions,” said Dr. ES Jung, President and Head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics. “We remain committed to addressing the needs of our customers through active investments and recruitment of talents. This will enable us to continue to break new ground while driving robust growth for Samsung’s foundry business.”

Following the initial mass production of the EUV-based 7nm process in early 2019, Samsung recently added a new EUV-dedicated V1 line in Hwaseong, Korea, to its global foundry network. With the new Pyeongtaek facility starting full operation in 2021, Samsung’s foundry capacity based on EUV is expected to increase significantly.

Samsung is scheduled to start mass production of 5nm EUV process in the Hwaseong fab in the second half of this year.

With the addition of the Pyeongtaek fab, Samsung will have a total of seven foundry production lines located in South Korea and the United States, comprised of six 12-inch lines and one 8-inch line.

Baidu KUNLUN chip is built on the company’s advanced XPU, a home-grown neural processor architecture for cloud, edge, and AI, as well as Samsung’s 14-nanometer (nm) process technology with its I-Cube (Interposer-Cube) package solution.

The chip offers 512 gigabytes per second (GBps) memory bandwidth and supplies up to 260 Tera operations per second (TOPS) at 150 watts. In addition, the new chip allows Ernie, a pre-training model for natural language processing, to infer three times faster than the conventional GPU/FPGA-accelerating model.

Leveraging the chip’s limit-pushing computing power and power efficiency, Baidu can effectively support a wide variety of functions including large-scale AI workloads, such as search ranking, speech recognition, image processing, natural language processing, autonomous driving, and deep learning platforms like PaddlePaddle.

Through the first foundry cooperation between the two companies, Baidu will provide advanced AI platforms for maximizing AI performance, and Samsung will expand its foundry business into high performance computing (HPC) chips that are designed for cloud and edge computing.

“We are excited to lead the HPC industry together with Samsung Foundry,” said OuYang Jian, Distinguished Architect of Baidu. “Baidu KUNLUN is a very challenging project since it requires not only a high level of reliability and performance at the same time, but is also a compilation of the most advanced technologies in the semiconductor industry. Thanks to Samsung’s state of the art process technologies and competent foundry services, we were able to meet and surpass our goal to offer superior AI user experience. ”

“We are excited to start a new foundry service for Baidu using our 14nm process technology,” said Ryan Lee, vice president of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “Baidu KUNLUN is an important milestone for Samsung Foundry as we’re expanding our business area beyond mobile to datacenter applications by developing and mass-producing AI chips. Samsung will provide comprehensive foundry solutions from design support to cutting-edge manufacturing technologies, such as 5LPE, 4LPE, as well as 2.5D packaging.”

As higher performance is required in diverse applications such as AI and HPC, chip integration technology is becoming more and more important. Samsung’s I-Cube technology, which connects a logic chip and high bandwidth memory (HBM) 2 with an interposer, provides higher density/ bandwidth on minimum size by utilizing Samsung’s differentiated solutions.

Compared to previous technology, these solutions maximize product performance with more than 50% improved power/signal integrity. It is anticipated that I-Cube technology will mark a new epoch in the heterogeneous computing market. Samsung is also developing more advanced packaging technologies, such as redistribution layers (RDL) interposer and 4x, 8x HBM integrated package.

2.5D Package Structure

About Baidu

Baidu, Inc. is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. Baidu aims to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu’s ADSs trade on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “BIDU”. Currently, ten ADSs represent one Class A ordinary share.