Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, showcased advanced memory and system logic devices at its Tech Day 2019 event. Fueling the future of tech for 5G, AI, cloud, edge, IoT, and autonomous vehicles, Samsung highlighted new processor and memory device capabilities. The company unveiled the Exynos 990 premium mobile processor, the 5G-enabled Exynos Modem 5123 and announced mass production of its third generation 10nm-class 1z-nm DRAM.

“Samsung is focused on harnessing the most advanced semiconductor technologies to power innovation across key markets,” said JS Choi, president, Samsung Semiconductor. “From System LSI devices that are perfectly adapted for real-world 5G and AI, to advanced solid-state drives (SSDs) that handle mission-critical tasks and offload CPU workload, we are determined to deliver infrastructure capabilities that are built to enable every wave of innovation.”

New technology announcements include:

• Exynos 990 and 5G Exynos Modem 5123: Delivers unprecedented AI-powered user experiences on-device with a dual-core neural processing unit (NPU) and enhanced digital signal processor (DSP) that can perform over ten-trillion operations per second. The Exynos 990 and 5G Exynos Modem 5123 harness the most advanced chipmaking technologies to-date with a 7-nanometer (nm) process using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.

• Third-generation 10nm-class (1z-nm) DRAM: Delivers the industry’s highest performance, energy efficiency and capacity, since mass production in September. Optimized for premium server platform development, the 1z-nm DRAM will open the door to a lineup of memory solutions at the cutting-edge such as DDR5, LPDDR5, HBM2E and GDDR6 products as early as the beginning of next year.

• 12GB LPDDR4X uMCP (UFS-based multichip package): Combines four 24Gb LPDDR4X chips and an ultra-fast eUFS 2.1 NAND storage into a single package, breaking through the current 8GB package limit in mid-range smartphones and bringing more than 10GB of memory to the broader smartphone market.

Samsung also proposed new business possibilities for next-generation memory technologies, including the company’s 7th-generation V-NAND with nearly 200 (1yy) cell layers for mobile and other premium memory solutions, and next-generation PCIe Gen5 SSDs for future server and storage applications.

Samsung’s third annual Tech Day hosted Silicon Valley’s leading companies, featured customer collaborations on GPU, PCIe Gen4 and HBM2e technologies, an industry-leading customer panel, and a demo pavilion showcasing the future of home automation, data centers, mobile/5G, and automotive technology.

“The proliferation of technological advances in 5G, edge computing and AI is changing the world at an exponential pace.  The impact of AI will be everywhere, from new avenues for communication and unprecedented connections. AI’s impact will be seen everywhere. Self-driving cars will take to our roads and homes and businesses will become truly connected,” said Choi. “To enable such innovations, technology infrastructure must lead the way. Samsung is committed to being at the heart of all this innovation — and it will be fascinating to see what the world can do.”

Samsung today is an unquestioned global technology leader – yet, in this complex and competitive global landscape, the company has been embarking on an active course to transform itself, navigating emergent challengers and new technology categories, as it sets course for the future.

A major driver in this transformation has been Samsung’s expansion in Silicon Valley, where the company has had roots for over 30 years. Since 2012, Samsung has been investing heavily to broaden its operations and strategic partnerships in the valley, assembling a cadre of area veterans and innovators to cultivate emerging areas such as AI, health, IoT, and the cloud, and at the macro-level, to transform Samsung’s own organization and operations.

From the decision to expand operations in Silicon Valley, to the current efforts there, to Samsung’s relentless mission to remain at the forefront of technology change, this three-part special feature hears directly from Samsung leaders in the valley on what the company is doing there.

Through strategic investment in products and hedging against risk in market entry, Samsung had, by the first decade of the new millennium, become the world’s largest technology maker. It leads various product categories – ranging from semiconductors to smart devices to home entertainment. Intent on continuing growth for the future, however, Samsung leaders actively sought to explore ways to cultivate innovations like IoT, AI, and the data economy, with their enormous potential and ability to break across traditional silos.

In leadership gatherings throughout the late 2000’s, Samsung Electronics’ top management articulated the direction even more directly to their brain trust of leaders: “How do you grow when you’re already the largest company? What are we going to look like ten years from now? It will be our critical mission to figure that out.”  While the past approach had involved Samsung benchmarking other players and finding a strategic position in ripe markets, the future called for it to take ownership of its growing industry leadership and be the catalyst to lead the future.

Having established Samsung Semiconductor (SSI) in Silicon Valley more than thirty years ago, Samsung leaders had long recognized the area as a nexus of open innovation, with SSI having played an instrumental role in the valley’s growth. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, Samsung leaders had also experienced in the valley prime example of the benefits in innovation to be cultivated from a ‘failure as fruitful’ approach – where mistakes and failure, both individually and with others, could drive innovation, and fine-hone developments.

In considering Samsung transforming for the future, the insights of SSI seemed a natural place to start, and the prospect of leveraging expansion into the valley as a vehicle for change, tantalizing. Realizing they were onto something, Samsung’s brain trust next went on a manhunt to recruit the best and brightest industry leaders as well as valley veterans, and soon had the core pieces in place including Young Sohn, currently president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics, and David Eun, president of Samsung NEXT and Samsung Electronics.

Shankar Chandran, who also was recruited into the mix to head the Samsung Catalyst Fund after 15 years as an active venture investor and former engineer, describes the vision coming together: “The tech world is consolidating behind certain major players and Samsung is one of the most prominent technology companies of the last decade. Joining the company and investing on behalf of Samsung is much more rewarding and impactful than as an independent investor. Our driving vision is simple. How do we lead in new areas?”

Today in Silicon Valley

After beginning strategic expansion in 2012, Samsung in Silicon Valley today boasts about 2,000 employees working across five major units throughout the Bay Area. The scope of work is both diverse and comprehensive from investments and partnerships in disruptive technologies and start-ups to hardware innovation in semiconductors, storage, and LCD panels to work in advanced software and the user experience.

While Samsung’s presence in Silicon Valley is diverse, each unit plays a unique and key role:

Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC) (est. 2012): SSIC’s mission is to develop and accelerate disruptive technologies through open innovation, investments, and acquisitions by working in collaboration with entrepreneurs and strategic partners.  Its investment arms, the Samsung Catalyst Fund (SCF) as well as in-house M&A team, have hit the ground running since inception. For example, SCF, which has offices in Menlo Park, California, Tel Aviv, and London, has completed more than 40 investments globally. This year, SSIC’s M&A team executed the USD 8 billion acquisition of audio, automotive and connected technologies leader, Harman International – South Korea’s largest overseas deal and Samsung’s largest acquisition to date. SSIC also spearheaded the development of the ARTIK Smart IoT platform, an open platform for simpler, faster development and deployment of IoT devices and applications.

Samsung NEXT (est. 2013): Samsung NEXT (formerly Open Innovation Center; Global Innovation Center) partners with innovators to build ideas into products, and grow products into businesses that scale, leverage and transform the broader Samsung ecosystem. Samsung NEXT has empowered thousands of entrepreneurs around the world through incubation, investment, partnership and acquisition. To date, the company has made more than 70 investments and has led the major acquisitions of startups including the mobile-payment solution LoopPay (Samsung Pay), the open IoT platform for connected home SmartThings, and the next-gen AI assistant Viv. In early 2017, Samsung NEXT launched a USD 150 million fund to increase Samsung’s global support of early-stage startups, pursuing advanced software and services innovation in areas such as cybersecurity and IoT, among others.  Beyond Silicon Valley, Samsung NEXT also has a team in Korea and has expanded to include locations in the hubs of San Francisco, New York, Tel Aviv, and most recently, Berlin.

Samsung Research America (SRA) (est. 1988): With roots tracing back to 1988, SRA moved into its new Mountain View campus in late 2013. SRA, which also has campuses across North America, researches and builds new core technologies to enhance the competitive edge of Samsung products, and strengthens open innovation by leveraging key relationships with start-ups and academic institutions. SRA consists of several labs from the Mobile Payments and Security Lab which focuses on technologies like Android, Knox, and Samsung Pay to the Digital Solutions Lab which feeds into Samsung’s visual display business to the Computer Science and Innovation Center focusing on areas like AI and convergence. The key approach of SRA is to bring all these units under ‘one roof’ to improve synergy and interwork across Samsung’s R&D efforts.

Open Innovation Transforming Samsung Operations

Samsung’s efforts in Silicon Valley are transforming its very own operations and business strategy. Innovating today to transform tomorrow, the focus is on priming technology and partnerships to identify, address and guide human-centric trends that will ultimately transform society, for real people everywhere.

While the investment portfolios are not always directly related to Samsung’s core businesses and existing product portfolios, they do aim to forecast wholly new sectors for the future. Samsung leadership is also very much nurturing this spirit to percolate throughout the entire Samsung organization – the aim not simply about the consumption of products, but the way the technologies become tools to transform the way Samsung invents, works, and collaborates with its broader ecosystem of industry peers and partners.

Part two of this series will look more specifically into the work of SSIC and Samsung NEXT, and how the teams there are driving for change and success across unique platforms and innovation areas.

Bringing together government representatives, mobile service providers, industry analysts and manufacturers, Samsung aimed to enable conversation and partnership-building to more efficiently catalyze the deployment of 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). This technology is expected to help revolutionize all facets of human life in an age when people, objects and data systems are becoming increasingly connected.

In addition to a keynote on 5G spectrum and government enablement led by Julius Knapp, Chief of the Federal Communications Commission Office of Engineering and Technology, the summit also addressed the current state, challenges and requirements in creating business opportunities for 5G technologies.

Industry experts such as academics and eco-partners defined the key technologies for creating an aligned 5G evolution path, helping shape the end-to-end ecosystem through testing, verifying and optimizing radio frequency performance using 5G frequencies above/sub 6GHz. Session speakers reiterated the need for the creation of a strong and sustainable ecosystem for successful 5G implementation.

The Silicon Valley 5G Summit, which successfully kick-started the conversation to explore ways to implement 5G FWA, is scheduled to become an annual event. Through efforts like these, Samsung will continue to remain dedicated to advancing the digital industry and accelerating the transformation of 5G from a vision to a reality.

The Silicon Valley 5G Summit was held at Samsung Research America in San Jose. Silicon Valley was chosen for the location of the event because the area itself represents an ecosystem for high tech innovation and development where key players are creating an innovative digital society.

“The rapid advancement of today’s mobile communications is astounding with ubiquitous access to information and immersive multimedia experiences,” stated Yongje Kim, EVP of Samsung Research America, in the event’s welcoming speech. “By enabling eco-partners across the industry to share their experiences and knowledge at today’s summit, we wish to see progress towards a complete scene of 5G.”

Julius Knapp, Chief of the Federal Communications Commission Office of Engineering and Technology, led the summit’s keynote speech. He noted that the role of policy makers should be made to enable 5G services in the aspect of frequency assignment.

Representing a wide cross-section of interests and expertise, the Silicon Valley 5G Summit featured session speakers that addressed 5G pioneer opportunities and the expanding 5G ecosystem.

Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, Executive Vice President, Head of the Next Generation Communications Business Team at Samsung Electronics, noted in the summit’s closing comments, “The collective intelligence we have seen today is the result of interaction between various industry segments, and I am confident that this will act as a catalyst in transforming 5G from vision to reality.”

Samsung Electronics today hosted the first Silicon Valley 5G Summit, held at Samsung Research America in San Jose, U.S. The summit, expected to become an annual event, brought together global telecommunications industry leaders from across the value chain to lay the foundation for an open end-to-end ecosystem for fifth generation (5G) networks.

More than 100 industry leaders gathered to discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in the commercialization of 5G technologies. The participants consisted of chip makers and other component manufacturers, telecom operators, universities, industry analysts, system vendors, investors, policy makers and measurement equipment vendors, representing a wide cross-section of interests and expertise.

The summit addressed the current status, challenges and requirements for creating business opportunities for 5G technologies. Government officials discussed the role of policy makers to enable 5G services through allocation of spectrum, while attendees examined the market outlook for new 5G service opportunities – including Fixed Wireless Access and the future of mobile connectivity services. Industry experts, including academics and eco-partners, held discussions on key technologies for creating an aligned 5G evolution path, helping to shape the end-to-end ecosystem through testing, verifying and optimizing radio frequency (RF) performance of 5G candidate frequencies above and below 6GHz.

“The United States was the first country to make broader ultra-high frequency millimeter wave spectrum bands available for next generation mobile wireless services. This was made possible through the swift action on wireless policy taken by the Federal Communications Commission,” said Julius Knapp, Chief of the Federal Communications Commission Office of Engineering and Technology, who delivered the Summit’s keynote speech. “Today’s summit will also accelerate 5G deployment and contribute to future wireless innovations for 5G and beyond.”

The summit consisted of session programs and an exhibition that featured a diverse range of ecosystem partners showcasing products and services. This summit program was designed to show the beginnings of strong and viable ecosystem that could support rapid 5G commercialization.

“We believe it is time to come together and shape the new era of 5G and, to that goal, it is critical to build a sustainable ecosystem by inviting all industry stakeholders to share their perspectives on how 5G will develop over the next few years,” said Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, Executive Vice President, Head of the Next Generation Communications Business Team at Samsung Electronics. “The collective intelligence we have seen today is the result of interaction between various industry segments, and I am confident that this will act as a catalyst in transforming 5G from vision to reality.”

“5G technologies will help bring about many new and enhanced services. Looking at the current pace of the market, 5G Fixed Wireless Access commercial services could be available in a few years’ time,” said Daryl Schoolar, Principal Analyst at Ovum. “For 5G Fixed Wireless Access to be successful, it will need a robust ecosystem in order to drive innovation, keep prices down, and ensure a strong multivendor environment. Today’s summit was an important first to kick-start discussions dedicated to 5G Fixed Wireless Access and other 5G opportunities.”

For more information on the Silicon Valley 5G Summit, please visit The Silicon Valley 5G Summit.

To learn more about 5G Fixed Wireless Access and the path to 5G mobility, please visit ‘5G Fixed Wireless Access, providing fiber speeds over the air while also helping pave the way for full 5G mobility‘ co-published by Samsung and Ovum.

The building stands 170-feet high and has been designed to meet the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards of the U.S. Green Building Council.

More than 30 years of innovation and discoveries in Silicon Valley have helped define Samsung’s digital devices inside and out. On September 24, Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions Division, part of its components business, celebrated the grand opening of its new American headquarters. Samsung’s DS teams have been spread across the area, and the brand new facility will join all team members together, allowing better communication across all disciplines.

Now home to R&D, marketing, sales and other teams, the new LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) 1.1 million-square-foot building will serve as a hub for state-of-the-art technologies in areas such as memory, logic, LED, displays and more.

Samsung is thrilled about the new facility. Let’s see how far it has come.

Employees can take a break in the peaceful courtyard located in the center of the building, one of the several open spaces around the facility.

The floor-to-ceiling windows create a bright space for employees to enjoy.

The open space design was chosen to encourage collaboration and enable frequent discussions.

A modern food court is available all day for employees to visit.

The facility is composed of a series of two-story office “buildings” stacked on top of each other, each separated by “green floors” with gardens and recreational spaces that are part of an effort to re-introduce the natural environment in office architecture.

Samsung Semiconductor’s new North American headquarters in San Jose, CA is a ten-story building with approximately 1.1 million square feet of space.

Read more:

Samsung Electronics Strengthens Its Presence in Silicon Valley with Opening of New Headquarters for U.S. Semiconductor Operations

Samsung Electronics, the world’s leading producer of semiconductor and display solutions, formally opened the doors to its new Device Solutions America headquarters here, setting the stage for a new wave of innovation across the digital landscape.

Located on the same corner in San Jose’s tech corridor where Samsung’s original campus was first built more than 30 years ago, the new headquarters symbolizes both Samsung’s long heritage in Silicon Valley and the company’s focus on innovation and growth.

Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor operations has long been at the forefront of innovation and with the new America headquarters for its components business, Samsung’s R&D efforts will be bolstered substantially. Innovation and advanced technologies for next-generation devices generated at the new facility will help make an even greater contribution to providing the critical competitive advantage that the company’s U.S. and global customers seek.

Speaking before an audience of more than 800 at the site’s Grand Opening ceremony, Oh-Hyun Kwon, Vice Chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, said “We are transforming Samsung into a world-class example of a truly market-focused technology company.” He further said that the company is “ laying the groundwork for a more aggressive pace of growth over the next several decades.”

While Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions Division has experienced explosive growth since its arrival in Silicon Valley in 1983, it has created multiple organizations dispersed throughout the region. The move brings more than 700 employees together in one location, enhancing efficiency that is crucial in creating technologies and products at the cutting edge of technology. The 1.1-million-square-foot building will house various research labs dedicated to semiconductors, LEDs and displays, as well as staff in sales, marketing and other support areas.

Complete with gardens and open air space within the building, its new design increases collaboration by encouraging more spontaneous encounters between staff, while also bringing nature closer to the workplace to increase employees’ contentment and creativity.

Samsung’s President of its Device Solutions America operations, Jaesoo Han, said, “Today represents a major milestone as we open our most strategically important Samsung facility in the U.S. and also our biggest investment in Silicon Valley.” He went on to say that “Samsung’s goal is nothing less than to develop the best next-generation technologies for device solutions.”

Dignitaries in attendance at the grand opening for Samsung’s new headquarters included the current mayor of San Jose—the Honorable Sam Liccardo, former San Jose mayor—the Honorable Chuck Reed, State Senator Bob Wieckowski, San Jose State University President Susan Martin, and San Francisco Korean Consul General Dongman Han.

In keeping with the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, Samsung announced a number of contributions at the event that will further support the Silicon Valley community. The company donated $100,000 to the Family Giving Tree and another $100,000 to the Second Harvest Food Bank.

Samsung Electronics has also established a $1 million STEM College Education Scholarship Fund to celebrate its latest expansion. Deserving university students who are currently enrolled in STEM-focused programs at a California State or University of California school will benefit from this program, beginning with a $50,000 gift to San Jose State University this year. Each scholarship will cover tuition and living expenses for one year.

Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions CSR programs are focused on enhancing health, education and sustainability opportunities for children. In addition to opening its new state-of-the-art facility in San Jose, Samsung is dedicated to supporting the local community and helping to inspire the next generation of innovators with volunteer staff support and corporate donations.

For more information, visit www.samsung.com/us/samsungGOC15.