In line with its focus on next-generation NPU technologies, Samsung plans to create over 2,000 related jobs worldwide by 2030, which is about 10 times the current headcount. The company will also expand upon its existing collaboration with globally distinguished research institutes and universities, and support the nurturing of future talent in the field of AI, including deep learning and neural processing.

“For the coming age of AI, Samsung is committed to delivering industry-leading advancements brought to life by our NPU technologies,” said Inyup Kang, president of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics. “As we leverage our differentiated technology, close partnerships with global institutes and active investment in top talent, we are excited to take future AI processing capabilities to the next level.”

Samsung introduced its first NPU in the company’s premium mobile processor, the Exynos 9820, last year and plans to continue offering advanced on-device AI features for high-performance mobile chips. Applications for Samsung’s NPUs will expand into areas such as automotive processors that power in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), as well as next-generation datacenters optimized for big data processing.

The System LSI Business and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology — Samsung’s R&D arm — together plan to extend and evolve the company’s current NPU research into novel AI hardware technologies such as neuromorphic processors that aim to operate at the level of a human brain.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that its Exynos Auto 8890 processor will be powering German automobile manufacturer Audi’s third generation high-spec modular infotainment platform (MIB). The advanced in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system will be equipped as standard in the new A4 and upcoming models.

The MIB is Audi’s technology that anticipates the drivers’ needs by keeping up with the latest advancements in information and entertainment equipment of its premium vehicles. Introduced in the reworked A4 and upcoming in further models, the latest generation of the MIB will incorporate Samsung’s Exynos Auto 8890, which had been selected for Audi’s next-generation IVI system in 2017 through Audi’s Progressive SemiConductor Program (PSCP). 

The Exynos Auto 8890 is a powerful processor with an octa-core CPU and twelve-core GPU designed to seamlessly run Audi’s Multi Media Interface (MMI) and its features such as audio, vehicle status control and navigation display on the IVI system. With powerful performance along with multi-OS and multi-display support, the Exynos Auto 8890 delivers a highly interactive user experience on up to four different domains.

“To Audi, mobility isn’t just about getting to the destination, it’s about getting there safely and delightfully,” said Alfons Pfaller, head of Architecture & Platform Development E/E at Audi. “We have worked closely with Samsung over the past few years to provide our customers with an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system that includes the newly upgraded Multi Media Interface that responds instantly and accurately to the user’s controls for a premium driving experience.”

“With a premium automobile brand like Audi, the driving experience is expected to be not only high performing and safe but also exhilarating,” said Kenny Han, vice president of Device Solutions Division at Samsung Electronics. “Through close-collaboration with Audi, we are excited that Samsung’s Exynos Auto 8890 will be powering their new in-vehicle infotainment system that will open new possibilities for smarter and more enjoyable driving experiences.”

The new Audi A4 with Exynos Auto 8890-powered IVI system will be available in Europe starting in the fall.

For more information about Samsung’s Exynos products, please visit http://www.samsung.com/exynos.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that its first automotive-branded processor, Exynos Auto V9, has been selected to power Audi’s next-generation in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system, which is expected to make its debut by 2021.

Exynos Auto V9 is a powerful automotive processor designed for advanced IVI systems that display content on multiple displays, providing information that assists drivers and passengers for a safer and more enjoyable in-vehicle experience. Based on cutting-edge 8-nanometer (nm) process technology, the V9 packs ARM’s latest Cortex-A76 CPU cores, ARM Mali G76 GPU, premium HiFi 4 audio digital signal processor (DSP), intelligent neural processing unit (NPU), and a safety island core that supports Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL)-B standards. The processor also supports fast and power-efficient LPDDR4 and LPDDR5 DRAM.

“Audi thrives to bring the most exciting, yet the safest automobiles when we vision the drive of tomorrow,” said Alfons Pfaller, head of Architecture & Platform Development E/E at Audi. “Samsung has been a valued technology partner over the past few years and we are extremely pleased to have the Exynos Auto V9 power our next-generation platform that will shape the future in-vehicle infotainment experiences.”

“Samsung is fully committed to bringing top-of-the-line automotive processors for safer and more pleasant driving experiences,” said Kenny Han, vice president of Device Solutions Division at Samsung Electronics. “We are thrilled to introduce the new Exynos Auto line of products, starting with the Exynos Auto V9, which brings powerful processing performance to the next generation of automotive in-vehicle infotainment systems while meeting the industry’s strict reliability requirements.”

To deliver highly immersive driving experiences, Exynos Auto V9 supports up to six displays and twelve camera connections for various sub-system content in premium IVI systems. The V9 is powered by eight Cortex-A76 cores at speeds up to 2.1 gigahertz (GHz). The GPU is arranged in three separate dedicated sets of Mali G76 GPU cores that are able to seamlessly support multiple systems such as the cluster display, central information display (CID) and rear-seat entertainment (RSE) simultaneously. For premium audio quality, the chip comes with four HiFi 4 audio processors that provide captivating audio experiences with vivid and realistic sounds.

Functional safety is especially critical when it comes to automotive components. Exynos Auto V9’s embedded safety island allows real-time protection for system operations, facilitating ASIL-B requirements.

In addition, the V9 is equipped with an NPU for a digital concierge service that can intelligently manage a safe and personalized driving environment. With incredibly fast operations, the NPU can process visual and audio data for features such as face, speech or gesture recognition.

For more information about Samsung’s Exynos products, please visit http://www.samsung.com/exynos.

Samsung Electronics announced today its HDR10+ ecosystem expansion to 45 industry partners and the construction of a new certification center in China. The new partnerships with companies, from online streaming and content services to semiconductor industry, will bring more true-to-life picture quality content to viewers and also expand the impact of HDR10+ technology across different market segments.

Last June, Samsung Electronics launched the HDR10+ certification and logo program in partnership with 20th Century Fox and Panasonic. HDR10+ is Samsung’s next-generation standard technology for picture processing, which optimizes brightness levels and contrast for each scene, making bright areas brighter and dark areas darker to deliver a lifelike viewing experience.

Thanks to Samsung’s new partnerships with content providers, consumers can soon access more content in vivid and reality-like colors. Rakuten TV, a European online streaming service, will begin offering HDR10+ content in the first half of next year. One of the largest among CIS and Eastern Europe OTT/VOD services, MEGOGO is currently finishing its HDR10+ licensing process, making its adoption of HDR10+ official, and planning to release HDR10+ contents on its platform, viewable on all Samsung Smart TV devices. ARSPRO, based in Moscow, is another production studio that has implemented HDR10+ technology, including the use of dynamic metadata. It has successfully carried out the remastering of the first several series of programming in HDR10+. On December 3^rd of this year, the largest Russian OTT/VOD service ivi also presented five European series in HDR10+ to Samsung Smart TV users for the first time in Russia and CIS region.

“We continually work on improving the video quality for our users. And we are proud to be the first Russian OTT/VOD service to maximize the opportunities available through Samsung QLED TVs and give a chance to our subscribers to view the contents in this new better-quality format. We plan to expand our HDR10+ collection because our focus is on providing the highest quality content to the viewers, using all the features of Samsung TVs,” said Irina Grandel, Business Development Director at ivi.

In 2017, Samsung also launched its premium video streaming service with Amazon, making Prime Video the first streaming service to deliver all 4K (UHD) videos in HDR10+. In 2018, Amazon integrated HDR10+ support into the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, which launched in October. Another HDR10+ partner Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has created over seventy HDR10+ compatible titles so far and plans to have over 100 titles available for digital distribution in HDR10+ by early next year.

Samsung is also building partnerships with major smartphone chip manufacturers. Qualcomm, a U.S. semiconductor and telecommunications equipment maker and a member of the HDR10+ alliance, recently announced that HDR10+ will be supported on its new chipset, Snapdragon 855. Arm, U.K.’s innovation-leading company in mobile technology that has successfully collaborated with Samsung System LSI, will also join the HDR10+ network, further growing HDR10+’s influence in the mobile category.

In addition, Samsung plans to build a new HDR10+ center in China with TIRT, a national testing and inspection center for the Chinese consumer electronics, in December. The center is designed to help Chinese TV manufacturers, including Hisense, TCL and Konka to access the certification procedure and in turn accelerate the expansion of the HDR10+ ecosystem. The China center follows the opening of certification centers built in Korea, Japan and the U.S. earlier this year.

“With HDR emerging as one of the most important technologies for ultra-high picture quality, Samsung’s HDR10+ format is gaining recognition,” said Hyogun Lee, Executive Vice President of the Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. “HDR10+ has already been well-received by major companies across a variety of industries. Samsung will continue to build on this, solidifying our HDR standard technology leadership and maintaining our presence in the global TV market.”

The company recently received the official HDR10+ logo certification for its 2018 Premium UHD and QLED TVs, including QLED 8K – a testament to the displays’ ability to produce lifelike images that depict content as creators intended. Samsung also continues to forge partnerships that are delivering premium viewing experiences to more consumers’ homes.

Samsung Newsroom recently sat down with Yeong-Taeg Kim, Vice President of Samsung Research America’s Digital Media Solutions Lab, to learn more about what the company is doing to expand this technology, and offer more people access to the best HDR content available.

What Is HDR10+?

 Introduced in 2017, HDR10+ reproduces colors with a level of accuracy that was previously impossible to achieve.

With most TVs, there’s an inevitable gap between the dynamic range of colors that the display is capable of producing, and the depicted content’s true colors. Traditionally, in order to approximate the appearance HDR, TVs with limited dynamic range have utilized a process known as ‘tone mapping’ to amplify images’ color. However, unlike previous HDR10 iterations, which utilized static tone mapping, in which color enhancement is uniform from scene to scene, HDR10+ employs dynamic tone mapping, which allows scenes to be optimized individually.

In a nutshell, the technology enables TVs to preserve creators’ intent in dark scenes and produce brighter highlights, adding a sense of depth to images that makes content seem more realistic and immersive. It works by embedding content with dynamic metadata, which creates an optimized tone-mapping curve based on a mathematical concept known as a Bézier curve. As Kim explained, “While the concept may be somewhat complex, the results are clear: the image optimization creates rich contrast that brings content’s color to life through the beauty of math.”

How It All Started

 It all started with a proprietary tone-mapping technology that was developed by the Digital Media Solutions Lab back in 2016.

The tone-mapping algorithm was unique as it was the first in the industry to automatically optimize colors in each scene on displays with limited dynamic range. While the team had originally planned to use the technology as a picture quality differentiator for future products, later that year, when the idea of dynamic tone mapping being the next big thing for HDR10 was the subject of intense debate within the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE), the team decided to utilize the technology to develop a new industry standard. A standard that would accommodate device manufacturers, studios and chipmakers, and offer each the freedom they need to innovate.

“We didn’t set out to build an industry standard from the beginning,” Kim explained. “It was the result of having the right technology in our hands at a time when it was most needed. We knew that by opening it up to the industry, we could accelerate the adoption of a ground-breaking innovation that would truly do justice to creators and their content.”

The Challenges

Despite the team’s optimism, creating a new standard was a challenge at first. Even with headquarters and managements’ support at the time, some within the company were skeptical as to whether Samsung would be able to create a viable industry standard that could be adopted by studios, chipmakers and device manufacturers.

“It was a tough call, but we all understood the significance of creating a new standard,” said Kim. “There was a lot of debate, but everyone came around when they realized that by creating a new standard, we’d also be keeping our promise to our consumers. If the industry relied on just one standard, it would be difficult to update previous HDR10 products.”

The biggest technological challenges laid in creating a mathematical curve that could be used as a base for tone mapping each scene, and figuring out a way to parameterize it into a set of data that could serve as a universal descriptor to represent the tone mapping behavior for a given scene. The mathematical curve not only needed to be optimized for every possible scene, it also needed to be flexible enough to do so. It was therefore important that the team find a curve that would cater to the way studios tend to map their tones: fragmented.

Creating a New Standard

After months of research and multiple simulations, the team, led by Dr. Li Tao, finally landed on a mathematical curve that was flexible enough to do the job.

The idea was to mimic the way that studios edit scenes. The Bézier curve turned out to be the perfect choice for replicating fragmentation, which meant that it would represent creators’ intentions more precisely. However, before they could utilize the curve as a base for creating dynamic metadata through mathematical optimization, the team would have to modify it first. It was at this point that they had the innovative idea to enhance its flexibility by transforming the two-dimensional curve to a one-dimensional data set.

With this increased flexibility came the ability to create optimized tone-mapping curves for each scene. By combining this with an algorithm that automatically transforms each curve into metadata, the team created a powerful tool that would allow Samsung’s TVs to offer consumers truly immersive viewing experiences.

Using the analogy of a master chef sharing a prized recipe, Kim explained the technology’s potential to change the way consumers experience content. “Imagine a chef’s culinary masterpiece, turned into a recipe for the ordinary household kitchen,” said Kim. “Imagine that the recipe is so precise that anyone can use it to create a near-perfect dish. Now, imagine a tool that writes this recipe automatically – instead of the chef – and for all types of cuisines. Finally, imagine that, once they buy the ingredients, the recipe becomes available to anyone.

“Samsung has not only created the standard for writing the ‘recipe,’ but the tool as well,” Kim continued. “But in order for this to happen, we need the ‘chefs’ (the studios), the ‘groceries’ (content providers) and the ‘cooks’ at home (device and chip manufacturers) to all work together.”

An Expanding Ecosystem

Since its official launch last year, HDR10+ has seen rapid expansion, spurred by Samsung and its partners’ decisions to (1) make the technology available to chip and TV manufacturers royalty-free, and (2) make the HDR10+ platform and metadata freely available to content companies, as well as UHD Blu-ray player and set-top box manufacturers.

As a result, we’re witnessing the establishment of a strong ecosystem of HDR10+ offerings, with the power to revolutionize home entertainment. In order to deliver immersive, lifelike visuals to more consumers’ living rooms, Samsung has been hard at work forging HDR10+ partnerships – spanning the worlds of cinema, software and device manufacturing – that are expediting the technology’s widespread adoption.

As Kim explained, the HDR10+ platform was designed to support seamless adoption without substantial economic or technological hurdles. “We have been collaborating with third-party software developers, including Colorfront and Blackmagic Design, among others, as well as encoding-system companies to embed HDR10+,” said Kim. “We’ve demonstrated the quality of HDR10+’s performance, and emphasized the economic aspects of implementation. Compared to HDR10 or other competitors, there are no additional costs associated with implementing HDR10+ for content creation, nor are there additional hardware costs for HDR10+ displays. The new platform’s contents are retroactively compatible with existing HDR10 devices.”

Samsung has established exciting partnerships with device, chip and projector manufacturers that will introduce more consumers to HDR10+’s true-to-life picture quality. Notable examples include V-Silicon (formerly Sigma Designs), and TP Vision. The company has also forged and expanded partnerships with leading film studios and content service providers including ivi, Russia’s largest online video service provider, Amazon Prime Video, and Warner Bros.

As noted by Kim, with more HDR10+ TVs, SoCs (System on Chip) and AVR and projector manufacturers set to join the fold soon, and more and more HDR10+ content coming down the pipeline, the official HDR10+ logo certification marks an important milestone, and represents the beginning of a new era for picture quality.

“The introduction of the HDR10+ certification logo represents the groundwork that we are setting for the ultra-high picture quality TV market,” said Kim. “Utilizing our leading technology and expertise, we will continue to extend our valuable partnerships while maintaining our commitment to providing consumers with the best HDR content possible.”

(From left to right) Back: Chenguang Liu, Dr. Yeong-Taeg Kim, Pradeep Nagesh, Seongnam Oh,  Front: Suzie Hyun, Li Tao