The event, held today in Santa Clara, California, features top Samsung executives and industry experts reviewing progress on semiconductor technologies and foundry platform solutions that enable developments in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, 5G networking, automotive, the Internet of Things (IoT), advanced data centers and many other domains.

“We stand at the verge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new era of high-performance computing and connectivity that will advance the daily lives of everyone on the planet,” said Dr. ES Jung, President and head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics.

“Samsung Electronics fully understands that achieving powerful and reliable silicon solutions requires not only the most advanced manufacturing and packaging processes as well as design solutions, but also collaborative foundry-customer relationships grounded on trust and shared vision. This year’s Foundry Forum is filled with compelling evidence of our commitment to progress in all those areas, and we’re honored to host and converse with our industry’s best and brightest,” Dr. Jung added.

Highlights from the U.S. Foundry Forum include:

The New 3nm GAE PDK Version 0.1 is Ready

Samsung’s 3nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) process, 3GAE, development is on track. The company noted today that its Process Design Kit (PDK) version 0.1 for 3GAE has been released in April to help customers get an early start on the design work and enable improved design competitiveness along with reduced turnaround time (TAT).

Compared to 7nm technology, Samsung’s 3GAE process is designed to provide up to a 45 percent reduction in chip area with 50 percent lower power consumption or 35 percent higher performance. The GAA-based process node is expected to be widely adopted in next-generation applications, such as mobile, network, automotive, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IoT.

Conventional GAA based on nanowire requires a larger number of stacks due to its small effective channel width. On the other hand, Samsung’s patented version of GAA, MBCFET (Multi-Bridge-Channel FET), uses a nanosheet architecture, enabling greater current per stack.

While FinFET structures must modulate the number of fins in a discrete way, MBCFET provides greater design flexibility by controlling the nanosheet width. In addition, MBCFET’s compatibility with FinFET processes means the two can share the same manufacturing technology and equipment, which accelerates process development and production ramp-up.

Samsung recently taped out the 3GAE test vehicle design and will focus on improving its performance and power efficiency going forward.

For more information, please refer to the Newsroom links for GAA infographic and video clip.

The Launching of a New SAFE–Cloud Program

As part of its ongoing efforts to support and enhance customers’ entire design workflow, Samsung Electronics launched the Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem Cloud (SAFE-Cloud) program. It will provide customers with a more flexible design environment through collaboration with major public cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, as well as leading Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies, including Cadence and Synopsys.

To date, most foundry customers have built and managed design infrastructure on their own servers. The SAFE-Cloud program reduces this burden and supports easier, faster and more efficient design efforts by providing an excellent turnkey design environment with extensive process information (PDK, design methodologies), EDA tools, design assets (IP, library) and design services.

Customers can be assured of as much server and storage space as they need, as well as a safe environment optimized for chip design, due to Samsung Electronics’ verification of SAFE-Cloud’s security, applicability and expandability.

Utilizing the SAFE-Cloud platform, Samsung was able to accelerate the development of its 7nm and 5nm cell libraries in collaboration with Synopsys. In addition, Samsung, Gaonchips – a fabless design company in Korea – and Cadence have successfully completed design verification based on the platform.

“Making up-front investments in high-performance computing (HPC) servers and systems can be a challenge for a company like us,” said Kyu Dong Jung, CEO of Gaonchips. “SAFE-Cloud offers us a very flexible design environment without requiring investment in additional infrastructure, as well as reduced design TAT. I expect this program to provide more tangible business and technical benefits to us and the entire fabless industry.”

Process Technology Roadmap and Advanced Packaging Updates  

Samsung’s roadmap includes four FinFET-based processes from 7nm down to 4nm that leverage extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology as well as 3nm GAA, or MBCFET.

In the second half of this year, Samsung is scheduled to start the mass production of 6nm process devices and complete the development of 4nm process.

The product design of Samsung’s 5nm FinFET process, which was developed in April, is expected to be completed in the second half of this year and go under mass production in the first half of 2020.

Extensions of the company’s FD-SOI (FDS) process and eMRAM together with an expanded set of state-of-the-art package solutions were also unveiled at this year’s Foundry Forum. Development of the successor to the 28FDS process, 18FDS, and eMRAM with 1Gb capacity will be finished this year.

Samsung Research, the advanced R&D hub of Samsung Electronics’ SET (end-products) business, has ranked first in two of the world’s top global artificial intelligence (AI) machine reading comprehension competitions.

Samsung Research recently placed first in the MAchine Reading COmprehension (MS MARCO) Competition held by Microsoft (MS), as well as showing the best performance in TriviaQA^* hosted by the University of Washington, proving the excellence of its AI algorithm.

With intense competition in developing AI technologies globally, machine reading comprehension competitions such as MS MARCO are booming around the world. MS MARCO and TriviaQA are among the actively researched and used machine reading comprehension competitions along with SQuAD of Stanford University and NarrativeQA of DeepMind. Distinguished universities around the world and global AI firms including Samsung are competing in these challenges.

Machine reading comprehension is where an AI algorithm is tasked with analyzing data and finding an optimum answer to a query on its own accord. For MS MARCO and TriviaQA, AI algorithms are tested in their capabilities of processing natural language in human Q&As and also providing written text in various types of documents such as news articles and blog posts.

For example in MS MARCO, ten web documents are presented for a certain query to let an AI algorithm create an optimum answer. Queries are randomly selected from a million queries from Bing (MS search engine) users. Answers are evaluated statistically by estimating how close they are with human answers. This is a test designed to apply an AI algorithm to solve real-world problems.

Samsung Research took part in the competitions with ConZNet, an AI algorithm developed by the company’s AI Center. ConZNet features skillful capabilities through adopting the Reinforcement Learning^** technique, which advances machine intelligence by giving reasonable feedback for outcomes, similar to a stick-and-carrot strategy in a learning process.

With the recent acceleration in global competition to develop AI technologies, contests are widespread in areas of computer vision (technologies to analyze characters and images) and visual Q&A to solve problems using recognized images of characters as well as machine reading comprehension. The Beijing branch of Samsung Research won the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) hosted by the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) in March, putting them in a top-tier group for global computer vision tests. The ICDAR is the most influential competition in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies.

“We are developing an AI algorithm to provide answers to user queries in a simpler and more convenient manner, for real life purposes,” said Jihie Kim, Head of Language Understanding Lab at Samsung Research. “Active discussion is underway in Samsung to adopt the ConZNet AI algorithm for products, services, customer response and technological development.”

^* Competitions such as MS MARCO and TriviaQA allow contestants to participate at any time, and rankings are altered according to real-time test results.

^** The Reinforcement Learning is the most advanced Machine Learning AI algorithm, and cutting-edge AI technologies including AlphaGo are upgrading machine intelligence by applying this technique.

The new AI technology achieves close to 8K resolution and enhanced sound quality by aligning with the unique characteristics of the specific content, a step up from typical upscaling technology used to improve image quality. So how exactly does it work? Let’s take a closer look.

Enjoy any content in 8K through Machine Learning

The world’s first 8K AI Technology that realizes a definition nearly the equivalent of 8K is based on Machine Learning. Computers or smartphones run according to directive values that humans enter. In contrast, Machine Learning refers to the way AI learns certain patterns and gives optimized answers based on various examples.

Samsung’s Machine Learning Super Resolution (MLSR) utilizes AI technology to compare low and high-quality versions of the same content to learn the technological differences between the two and form a vast database. It analyzes millions of pieces of video content and finds a correlation. Based on its analysis, it can select the optimum filters that support brightness, the level of blackness, spread and other errors from all inputs, and transform low-definition content to close to 8K high definition.

The input content is recognized as ‘real-time’ based on a frame and is enhanced by scenes, which makes it possible to upgrade image and sound quality immediately, regardless of whether the video source is live streaming or OTT (Over The Top).

8K picture quality through AI, what’s the difference?

Other upscaling techniques require human input to compare low-resolution and high-resolution scenes and find ways to reconstruct them. However, Samsung’s AI Technology enables it to self-study millions of images on its own using MLSR, allowing much-improved accuracy compared to conventional technologies.

There are three elements to improving picture quality on displays. First is ‘Detail Creation’ that sharpens the detail of expression and improves the texture to areas with low definition that have become blurry after compressing the file. Second, ‘Edge Restoration’ defines the edges of text, people or objects in a video, moving pixels on the borders to thin them down to increase legibility and visibility. For example, if text context is spreaded along the edges, the video will be adjusted around the text for clarity. In a video that shows the moon, Edge Restoration improves details of the moon’s shadow and enhances the darkness of the background for a clear distinction. Lastly, ‘Noise Reduction’ gets rid of static noises generated during high compression or recompression of files. In order to transmit an image, it is necessary to compress the image. In this process, various ‘noises’ such as a jiggling point or a squared dot can be effectively removed according to the image characteristics.

AI delivers immersive sound effects

When watching dramas or movies, realistic, immersive sounds are as important as picture quality. Samsung’s AI technology not only transforms low-definition into high-definition, but also optimizes the sound quality of content.

Conventional TVs provide multiple view settings such as movie mode and sports mode according to the genre of content. With Samsung’s new AI technology, content can be automatically analyzed by characterizing scenes to provide optimum sounds.

For example, let’s say you were watching a movie that includes musical performances. AI technology can highlight the music in a way that allows you to experience the sound as the actual characters would. When the crowd applauds after the performance is over, you would hear the clapping the same way as if you were in the crowd in the movie. When characters are speaking, AI adjusts the sound to make sure the lines are communicated clearly.

Imagine you were watching a relay broadcast of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics that started last week. AI will enhance the voice of the announcer so that you don’t miss who’s up next. When a game has started, AI will increase the background sound to deliver the liveliness of the actual game. With this tailored sound adjustment scene by scene, audiences can enjoy the best sound quality for any genre of content.

Samsung developers plan to continue to improve sound quality according to the preferences of individual viewers so that each viewer can enjoy the best TV viewing experience, right for them. Because volume patterns differ for every user, and the viewing environment can change according to the time of day and other factors, the sound will be accordingly adjusted and optimized to provide the most enjoyable experience to each individual viewer.

Why does 8K AI technology matter?

As customer needs for high-definition TVs and content increases, some terrestrial broadcasting stations have committed to working towards UHD delivery, and various IPTV and cable channels have initiated 4K UHD (3,840 × 2,160) services. However, even as the TV industry begins to launch 8K (7,680 × 4,320) TVs, the reality is that 4K content is, as of yet, still not fully utilized in homes.

In this context, Samsung has proposed a new direction for TV technology by combining 8K UHD display technology and premiere content through AI. Samsung has developed an AI algorithm that automatically enhances picture quality to solve the problem of limited high-quality content. As example, AI technology plays a key role in the 85-inch 8K QLED TV technology that Samsung introduced at CES 2018.

Samsung will begin the process of applying AI technology to its 8K QLED TVs from the second half of this year, and viewers will soon be able to enjoy UHD quality video that is nearly 8K in resolution and delivers optimized sound for any type of content. A genuine 8K era is now on the horizon, and Samsung will continue to lead the way.