<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span> Shows EUV Design at ISSCC
  Samsung will describe a 7nm SRAM made with extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February. Other ISSCC papers will detail memories, sensors and processors spanning everything from fast DRAMs to location trackers embedded in a boot.  Reinforcing its commitment earlier this year to be the first chip maker to use EUV, Samsung will describe a 0.026μm2 SRAM bit cell in a 7nm process it aims to make available next year. The chip is the smallest SRAM described to date and uses a double-write driver to reduce minimum supply voltage.  Two papers on specialty memories should attract attention. TSMC will describe an 11 Mbit resistive RAM macro made in a 40nm process. It uses a new sense amplifier TSMC claims offers a 58 percent faster access speed as well as a new write scheme to improve endurance and retention.  Separately, Japan’s Semiconductor Energy Laboratory will discuss a 60nm crystalline oxide semiconductor FET used in a deep-learning accelerator due to its speed and low power. The Kbit cell can be read in 45ns and written in 20ns, drawing 97.9pJ and 123pJ of energy.  Papers in more conventional DRAM and flash sessions show stepwise advances with few surprises.  Samsung and SK Hynix will describe 16 and 8 Gbit GDDR6 DRAMs, respectively, with maximum data rates of 16-18Gbits/s/pin using single-ended signaling. SK Hynix also will detail its eight-layer HBM2 that delivers 64 Gbits of memory on a 341 GByte/s interconnect.  In flash, Samsung will present its much-discussed Tbit NAND based on 64 stacked layers and four bits/cell. Toshiba and Western Digital will counter with a 512 Gbit design using three bits/cell in a 96-layer stack. Separately, Samsung will describe its Z-NAND that achieves a 15μs latency as well as a solid-state drive controller for it that aims to compete with Intel’s Optane drives.  ISSCC typically packs a few papers from the left field of silicon research. This year’s event sports at least two in sensors.  A group of researchers from four universities will present a smart shoe that helps walkers find their way when GPS signals are not available. It combines a MEMS sensor array, a low-power interface ASIC and a nine-axis inertial measurement unit embedded in the heel of a boot to deliver position accuracy of 5.5 meters over a 3.1 km distance.  Separately, researchers from South Korea will show how they packed a 360-degree camera into an ingestible capsule. They used four cameras and a set of distributed “body-channel” transceivers to create an 80Mbit/s link to the capsule that delivers four frames/s at VGA resolution and can locate the capsule to within less than a centimeter.  Session organizers said it marks the first such device with wireless telemetry. It “increases the patient’s autonomy and reduces health care costs significantly by facilitating cloud-based remote patient monitoring,” they added.  In more conventional sensors, Sony and Microsoft will push the limits of CMOS imagers and time-of-flight cameras.  Sony will describe a 1.46MP BSI global shutter CMOS image sensor expected to be used for scientific and industrial applications. It employs an in-pixel ADC thanks to 3D stacking techniques that Sony’s imagers continue to pioneer.  For its part, Microsoft will present a 1024×1024 time-of-flight image sensor made in a TSMC 65nm process. Organizers said it sports the smallest pixels and highest resolution for such products routinely used in gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality and the Internet of Things.  Interestingly, TSMC will show a new architecture for a CMOS imager aimed to increase video frame rates four- to nine-fold. The 13.5MP 3D-stacked sensor uses a bank of column ADCs, and is likely a showcase of the company’s CMOS imager process.  In what will likely be one of the more heavily attended sessions at ISSCC, Google will present the concept of a single compute fabric for machine-learning from the device to the data center as well as the technical challenges to enable it. To date, Google has been relatively forthcoming about its TPU accelerator for the data center,but has said less about client hardware.  Separately, David Patterson, a retired Berkeley professor and author now working at Google on the TPU and other projects, will give a keynote on the history of computer architectures. Many other papers will describe machine-learning accelerators, but they are generally academic efforts.  Processor papers in the ISSCC advance program held few surprises. For example, Intel will detail its Skylake server CPU released earlier this year, IBM will discuss its previously announcedz14 mainframe host and AMD will present more information on how it packaged its multichip Zen x86 processors.  One interesting paper from Intel is probably a research effort. It details a 14nm centimeter-scale self-powered IoT edge node with a 25 mW peak power consumption. It runs at 200-950 MHz and packs an x86 core, blocks to process crypto operations and convolutional neural nets, a “sub-mW wake-up radio” and 512KB memory.  In a session on wired communications, Intel and IBM will both describe state-of-the-art 112 Gbit/s serdes using PAM-4 modulation. STMicroelectronics will present a 56G serdes made in an FD-SOI process.
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Release time:2017-11-14 00:00 reading:1538 Continue reading>>
<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span>'s Chip Sales Hit New High
  South Korea's Samsung Electronics nearly tripled its third-quarter profit, largely on the strength of $17.8 billion in chip sales, a company record for any quarter.  Growth in semiconductor profit offset profit sequential declines in Samsung's mobile handset and display businesses.  The semiconductor business accounted for $8.9 billion of Samsung's $12.9 billion in profit, as sales of memory chips enjoyed widespread strength across all applications, especially high-performance memory chipsets for servers.  Samsung, the largest seller of memory chips worldwide, is all but certain to pass Intel to become the No. 1 chip vendor globally in 2017. Samsung's $17.8 billion in third quarter chip sales compares to about $16.1 billion for Intel.  Samsung's record-setting 2017 is being largely driven by a red hot memory chip market on pace to enjoy its largest annual growth in years. According to market research firm IC Insights, overall memory chip revenue is projected to grow by 58 percent in 2017, including a 72 percent increase for DRAM and a 44 percent increase for NAND. Samsung is the market leader in both segments.  Third quarter NAND sales were boosted by the launch of several flagship smartphones and expansion of cloud infrastructure, Samsung said, adding that the company actively responded to demand from value-added and high density markets such as datacenter NVMe SSD. For DRAM, the expansion of cloud services and the trend for higher density drove strong demand, Samsung said.  The supply of NAND is expected to remain tight in the fourth quarter, Samsung said. The company said it would pursue "a more profit-focused product mix" and said the trend toward high-performance, high-density mobile NAND is forecast to continue in 2018.  Samsung said it would expand its 1nxm process migration for DRAM in the fourth quarter amid expected high seasonal demand for mobile and PC and the continuing expansion of datacenter sales.  Samsung said its third quarter results were also boosted by strong sales or logic chips and foundry. But the company said weak seasonality for processors and image sensors is expected to dampen growth in the fourth quarter.  Foundry sales growth is also likely to be limited in the fourth quarter, Samsung said, though the company expects to diversify the 10nm node from mobile to cryptocurrency mining applications, while diversifying the customer base for new 8nm offerings.  Samsung said its mobile handset business saw strong shipments thanks to the launch of Galaxy Note 8 and solid sales of the new Galaxy J series, but its earnings declined sequentially due to the higher sales proportion of mass-market smartphones. The display panel segment posted an earnings decline despite expanded sales of flexible OLED panels for premium smartphones, the company said.  Overall, Samsung's third quarter sales grew to 62.05 trillion South Korean won (about $55.4 billion), up 30 percent from the third quarter of 2016. The company's profit increased to 14.53 trillion won (about $12.9 billion), up 261 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.
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Release time:2017-11-01 00:00 reading:1538 Continue reading>>
Apple and <span style='color:red'>Samsung</span> Headed Back to Court
<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span> Secures IoT Node-to-Cloud
  Samsung announced a soup-to-nuts security offering for the Internet of Things. It is part of the Korean giant’s ambitions to carve out a business in chips for IoT end nodes and gateways as well as cloud services that include machine learning.  As the next step in that direction, Samsung will start shipping a suite of secure IoT products in November. They span modules with a hardware root-of-trust to encryption and authentication of over-the-air software updates, applications, and cloud services.  “We believe that security will become a strong value proposition in this space and it will only get stronger … [overall,] our strategy is that we want to be an IoT company internally and externally,” said James Stansberry, general manager of Samsung’s Artik IoT group.  For Samsung, IoT represents an opportunity to sell a wide variety of processors, memories, and connectivity chips integrated into modules. It also is part of a move to court developers to write cloud-based apps that could serve everything from Artik IoT customers to Samsung’s own increasingly connected systems that range from smartphones to refrigerators.  “It’s a multidimensional play involving devices, mobile, and consumer electronics,” said Stansberry, who joined Samsung a year ago after running the IoT group at Silicon Labs.  On the semiconductor side, Artik spans a range of chips from integrated ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers to eight-core applications processors. Today, most of the chips inside its modules, first launched in mid-2015, are from third parties — but that will change.  “In the beginning, there was little Samsung content, but we are gradually replacing chips with Samsung silicon,” he said.  For example, an end-node module announced in May includes a Samsung three-core ARM chip with integrated Wi-Fi. Another Samsung integrated chip for end nodes will ship early next year, followed by a Samsung gateway processor with connectivity chips from a third party.  Stansberry would not discuss the size of the IoT group’s business. Its use of Samsung chips “is modest at this point, but the objective is to increase it,” initially focusing on local area connectivity sweet spots such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Thread, and zigbee aimed at homes, factories, and commercial buildings.  Market watcher IC Insights ranked Samsung as fourth in 2016 microcontroller sales behind NXP, Renesas, and Microchip. The Korean giant had estimated MCU revenues of $1.87 billion, down 14% from $2.17 billion in 2015, partly because of weak demand for smartcard MCUs. Today, most of the company’s MCUs that don’t go into smart cards are used in Samsung’s own systems, it said.  Samung’s secure modules will use a standalone secure element to support key storage for secure boot and other features. They will use a variety of standards for encryption, authorization, and signed apps. The company is also expected to roll out cloud-based machine-learning services before the end of the year.
Release time:2017-10-19 00:00 reading:1460 Continue reading>>
Tessera Files Infringement Suits Against <span style='color:red'>Samsung</span>
Release time:2017-09-30 00:00 reading:1754 Continue reading>>
<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span>, Xilinx Back Programmable Chip Startup
  Programmable logic vendor Xilinx Inc. and the venture capital arm of Samsung Electronics were among a handful of firms to provide $9.5 million in funding to Efinix, a developer of silicon-based programmable product platforms based in Silicon Valley.  Efinix (Santa Clara, Calif.), founded in 2012, has raised a total of $16 million. The company says its Quantum programmable technology delivers a four-fold power, performance and area advantage over traditional technologies. The technology is based on what Efinix calls an XLR (exchangeable logic and routing) cell that can function as either a look-up table (LUT)-based logic cell or  routing switch encoded with a scalable, flexible routing structure.  According to Efinix, this technology improves the active area utilization by 4X compared with traditional FPGAs, resulting in up to 4X area efficiency and 2X power consumption advantage.  According to the company's website, Efinix is currently developing silicon products based on Quantum and expects to begin sampling in Decemeber of this year.  The funding round was led by Xilinx and Hong Kong X Technology Fund, an investment firm supported by Sequoia Capital China and focused on fast-growing tech firms. Samsung Ventures, Hong Kong Inno Capital and Brizan Investments also participated in the funding round, according to Efinix.  Sammy Cheung, co-founder, CEO, and president of Efinix, said in a press statement that the company plans to use the funding to launch a number of joint development projects in the coming months in addition to the chips.  "High-volume applications and markets are prime targets for our Quantum-accelerated products," Cheung said.  Also in the press statement, Salil Raje, senior vice president of the software and IP products group at Xilinx, said, "Efinix’s solution can address a wide variety of applications that are typically not served by today’s FPGAs."  An unnamed representative from Samsung Ventures said Samsung envisions many applications that feature Quantum technology embedded inside ASICs, ASSPs or FPGAs.
Release time:2017-09-30 00:00 reading:3946 Continue reading>>
<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span>, Intel Back Process Control Vendor
  A group of chip companies led by Samsung and Intel have invested $11.2 million in a supplier of semiconductor manufacturing process control systems.  The series C venture round was led by Samsung Venture Investment Corp., the VC arm of South Korea's Samsung Electronics. Samsung was joined in the funding round by Hitachi High-Tech, sk Hynix and existing investors Intel Capital, Lam Research and MKS Instruments, according to Reno Sub-Systems (Sparks, Nev.).  Reno Sub-Systems was founded in 2014 by a group of semiconductor industry veterans with backgrounds in the manufacturing equipment and process control space. The company offers two principal technologies —  flow control for gases used in the chip making and RF power generation and matching for impedance matching of electrical loads used in the process.  According to Chris Davis, a Reno Sub-Systems co-founder and who is also the firm's senior vice president of sales and marketing, Reno Sub-Systems has found willing investors in chip vendors and capital equipment suppliers because the company's technology is "radically better" than what has been used in the semiconductor manufacturing process for decades.  RF matching networks currently used in the manufacturing process, for example, are based on a vacuum variable capacitor (VVC) technology that was originally patented by Nikola Tesla in 1896, Davis said. Reno Sub-Systems' products are based on an electronically variable capacitor (EVC) matching network technology and can achieve RF matching in a matter of microseconds, dramatically faster than the one to three seconds required for today's state-of-the-art VVC technology, he said.  "The industry has been asking for improvements in the matching network for many years," Davis said in an interview with EE Times.  Prior to founding the company, Davis and his co-founders, including Chief Technology Officers Imran Bhutta and Daniel Mudd, approached several chip makers and equipment suppliers to gauge their interest in the technology. Their enthusiast reaction convinced the group that it had technologies that the market was hungry for.  "We are old enough that we did our own due diligence before we tried to do a startup in this crazy industry," Davis said.  Reno Sub-Systems has now raised more than $35 million in three rounds of funding from strategic investors, including the venture arms of three of the top five semiconductor vendors and two of the four largest suppliers of etch process tools, as well as a key subsystem supplier — Shanghai's Xipu Hanxin Electronics. Davis said the company plans to use the new funding to support continued development of its technology.  Investors see the value in Reno Sub-Systems' technology for helping them migrate to more advanced technology nodes through greater precision and process repeatability. While Davis said the company is engaged with customers and potential customers at various levels of the chip making spectrum, the list of backers makes it clear that leading edge chipmakers are the most eager to nurture and secure access to the company's technology.  "We saw high value in Reno’s technology, so it only made sense for us to pursue an investment," said Dong-Su Kim, vice president of Samsung Venture Investment, in a press statement.
Release time:2017-09-29 00:00 reading:1588 Continue reading>>
<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span> Says EUV on Schedule for 2018
  South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. confirmed that it continues to expect to put extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography into initial production with its 7nm Low Power Plus (LPP) process in the second half of next year.  Samsung (Seoul) also announced the addition of an 11nm LPP process utilizing FinFET technology to its process technology offerings, saying it would deliver up to 15 percent higher performance and up to 10 percent reduction in chip area compared to its 14nm LPP process while consuming the same amount of power.  EUV, the long-heralded successor to 193nm lithography that has been delayed numerous times over the past decade, finally appears to be poised for prime time with leading edge chip makers Intel, TSMC, Samsung and Globalfoundries all targeting production deployment over the next 18 months.  The results of a survey of 75 semiconductor luminaries released Monday (Sept. 11) indicated that 75 percent now believe that EUV will be adopted in high-volume manufacturing before 2021. Just 1 percent said EUV will never be embraced, down from 6 percent last year and a whopping 35 percent in 2014.  Samsung said it has processed close to 200,000 wafers with EUV lithography technology since 2014 and has recently seen visible improvement with EUV technology, such as achieving  80 percent yield for 256 Mb SRAM.  Samsung said Monday that it expects that its 10nm FinFET process for mobile smartphone processors and its 11nm LPP process would bring differentiation and value to mid- and high-end phones.
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Release time:2017-09-13 00:00 reading:1504 Continue reading>>
<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span> to Invest $7 Billion in China Fab
  Samsung will invest $7 billion over a three-year period to ramp up a Chinese fab to expand production of NAND flash memory that’s in strong demand for smartphones and other mobile devices.  The investment is for a new fab in Xi’an that would be the second chip facility at the northern China site. On Monday (Aug. 28), Samsung approved $2.3 billion of the expected investment of $7 billion, according to reports by Reuters and Bloomberg that said the South Korea-based chipmaker was their news source.  The company has been investing aggressively as industry-wide capital spending is expected to soar by 20 percent in 2017, largely driven by Samsung, according to market watcher IC Insights. The key driver behind strong growth this year has been the memory chip segment.  Samsung’s full-year 2017 capital expenditures could range from $15 billion to $22 billion. If Samsung spends $22 billion this year, total semiconductor industry capex could reach $85.4 billion, representing a 27 percent increase over the $67.3 billion the industry spent in 2016, IC Insights said.  China is expected to become the world’s second-largest market for chip equipment by 2018 as a number of startups in the nation are ramping up new fabs.  China will increase overall fab spending, including construction and equipment, by 54 percent annually as the nation’s spending rises from $3.5 billion in 2016 to $5.4 billion in 2017, according to global chip equipment industry association SEMI. By 2018, the figure will jump to $8.6 billion in 2018, according to SEMI.  Mum comment  A Samsung Electronics spokesman declined to comment on the amount of capacity to be added in the second Xi’an China fab. Samsung built its first fab in Xi’an in 2014, and that facility is in full operation.  The company, which just this year is expected to become the world’s largest chipmaker, snatched 38.3 percent of the global NAND flash memory market revenue during the April-June period this year, according to the news reports, citing market watcher IHS.  In the meantime, China has been trying to build a domestic memory industry to satisfy its huge demand for semiconductors that as of today, the nation has no choice but to import. In the meantime, companies such as Samsung have been investing in expansion of Chinese memory chip production, anticipating growth of the domestic industry.  A memory boom propelled Samsung to record profit in the second quarter this year, and the company has forecast that situation is likely to continue in the current July-to-September quarter.  Samsung’s strength in memory chips has driven the company’s earnings to a record in the most recent quarter, and helped it become more profitable than Apple Inc.  Samsung had about 41 percent of the NAND market in the March quarter, more than double the 18 percent of Toshiba Corp., which developed the technology, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from IDC.  To be sure, Samsung’s outlook isn’t totally rosy. Five top executives of South Korea’s largest conglomerate that accounts for nearly a fifth of the nation’s economy have been sentenced to jail terms of up to five years on charges of bribery involving top-level officials of the South Korean government.  Nearly a decade ago, Samsung and its other competitors in the memory chip business paid a fine of about $1 billion to the U.S. government for price fixing.
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Release time:2017-08-30 00:00 reading:1207 Continue reading>>
<span style='color:red'>Samsung</span> Verdict Jolts South Korea
  A South Korean court sentenced the head of Samsung Group, Jay Y. Lee, to five years in prison. The decision is seen as a watershed for the country’s techno-political climate long dominated by large conglomerates, but it is not expected to immediately impact its surging and vast electronics businesses.  The sentence was the mandatory minimum for Lee, who was convicted along with four other Samsung executives of charges including bribery of the former South Korea president Park Geun-hye, according to a Korean newspaper report. It marks the first time a Samsung leader has been jailed, although Lee’s father and grandfather both faced court actions during their tenures running the group, it said.  Samsung’s attorneys called the verdicts unacceptable and are expected to appeal the decisions.  In recent years, public opinion has shifted away from the chaebols, loosely translated as “wealth clans,” said a Reuters report. Once seen as heroes rebuilding the country’s post-war economy, “they have more recently been criticized for holding back the economy and stifling small businesses and start-ups,” it said.  In an opinion article, one Bloomberg reporter said the sentence should be treated as a pivot point for South Korean business.  “Only by locking Lee up…and keeping him there for his full sentence, will the government and courts send a convincing message that corporate malfeasance will no longer be tolerated…Whenever he emerges from his cell, Samsung’s shareholders and managers shouldn't welcome him back into the corporate fold. That would strengthen the message that criminal behavior will no longer be tolerated in Korea’s business community,” he said.  The six-month trial has already shaken Samsung Group. It dismantled a strategy group which oversaw the group’s many divisions. Samsung executives Choi Gee-sung and Chang Choong-ki, who headed that strategy group, were each sentenced to four-year prison terms, the Korean newspaper reported.  The surging systems and semiconductor businesses of Samsung Electronics are not expected to be directly or immediately affected by the sentences.  Lee was not involved in the day-to-day management of those businesses. “He was more of a guiding hand for the empire," said Geoffrey Cain, author of an upcoming book on Samsung, quoted in a BBC report. Cain said the verdict is “just the start” of reforms promised by South Korea’s new president of the chaebols that make up more than half the country’s economy.  Riding rising memory chip prices, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. unseated Intel Corp. in the second quarter to become the world's leading semiconductor vendor for the first time. The chip division posted sales for the quarter of about $15.78 billion compared to $14.8 billion for Intel.  At that time, Bill McClean, president of IC Insights, said in an email exchange with EE Times that Samsung is likely to grow chip sales faster than Intel on average. It may well have a handle on the No. 1 spot for at least the foreseeable future, he said.  In May, one analyst said he expects Samsung’s newly independent foundry business will take share from TSMC, possibly winning business from Nvidia and MediaTek.  In April, the foundry group revealed a road map down to a 4nm process as well as leadership in FD-SOI, seen as an emerging process for more mainstream designs. It also announced plans to put extreme ultraviolet lithography into production in 2018 at the 7nm node, potential months ahead of rivals.  In smartphones, Samsung was listed by Strategy Analytics as the leading brand with 22 percent market share in the second quarter. It shipped more smartphones than Apple and Huawei combined in the period, according to the market watcher.  The results speak well of how Samsung managers were able to recover from the debacle with battery failures on its Galaxy Note 7 in 2016. With its steady growth and a North America headquarters opened in Silicon Valley in late 2015, the company is seen as a top place to work by engineers.  The Bloomberg opinion piece noted Samsung’s stock price has surged 24 percent since Lee’s arrest in February. “The talented and experienced professional executives at its biggest corporations no longer require family patriarchs at the helm to achieve growth and profits,” it said.
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Release time:2017-08-28 00:00 reading:1432 Continue reading>>

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