At its annual conference, Samsung laid out its vision for the future of its technology.
Since 2017, Samsung has held an annual “Tech Day” conference in which they release new technology, discuss the state of the industry, and unveil their plans for the future. Last week marked Samsung Tech Day 2022, and with it, the company brought a lot of interesting developments to light. The event comes on the heels of Samsung Foundry Forum 2022, where the company laid out its foundry plans.
Between plans for 1.4 nm, a detailed layout of their future plans in the memory market, and goals of expanding their industry outreach, there was a lot to unpack from this past week. In this article, we’ll dissect some of the major highlights from the conference.
Plans for 1.4 nm by 2027
Amongst the excitement, last week Samsung announced their plans to continue scaling their process technology at their Foundry Forum 2022.
Earlier this year, Samsung began production of its 3 nm node, making them the first foundry in the industry to do so. Now, they have their sights set on their next generation process technology, which will be a 2 nm node.
MOS FET evaluation to reach advanced nodes. Image used courtesy of Samsung
Currently, the plan is to reach 2 nm production by 2025. According to Samsung, achieving this scale will be directly related to enhancements in their gate-all-around (GAA) based transistor technology. Beyond that, Samsung envisions reaching the 1.4 nm node by 2027, while also aiming to increase their advanced node production by 3x by 2027 as well.
Memory Plans for Today and Tomorrow
Of the many things discussed at Samsung Tech Day 2022, one of the most significant discussions centered around Samsung’s current and future memory plans.
For its current plans, Samsung used Tech Day to unveil its eighth and ninth generation V-NAND offerings, as well as its fifth generation DRAM offerings, For V-NAND, the company is currently offering, 512 GB triple-level cell (TLC) products, but anticipates releasing a 1 terabyte TLC version later in this year.
For DRAM, the fifth generation offering will be a 10 nm (1b) and will enter mass production in 2023. Other DRAM solutions coming in the near future include a 32 GB DDR5 solution, 8.5 GPS LPDDR5X DRAM, and 36 GPS GDDR7 DRAM.
A rendering of Samsung’s newest DDR5 solution. Image used courtesy of Samsung
Looking further into the future, Samsung has big plans for their V-NAND, claiming that, by 2030, they will achieve V-NAND with over 1,000 layers. To do this, Samsung is placing their focus on a transition from their current TLC architecture to a quad-level cell (QLC) architecture, which will bring greater density and the ability to add more layers.
Looking again at DRAM, the company announced R&D efforts into innovative architectures and materials, such as High-K, to help scale their DRAM beyond 10 nm. Samsung also revealed that they will be placing an emphasis on developing tailored DRAM solutions, such as processing in memory (PIM).
Industry Outreach
Finally, Samsung used Tech Day 2022 as an opportunity to lay out some of their plans for the future in terms of increased industry outreach.
A key initiative from this was Samsung’s System LSI Business, announcing their intention to become “total solution fabless”. By this, the group means that they will strengthen their relationship with customers by leveraging their product offerings, including SoCs, Mics, and security solutions, into a single platform to be leveraged by their customers. In this way, Samsung will be able to design custom solutions for its customers that are optimized for their solutions, all in a fabless way.
On top of this, Samsung is increasing their industry outreach through the expansion of trade partnerships. Specifically, they will be opening a Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) where customers and vendors will be able to test Samsung memory devices in a variety of applications and environments. This is being done in collaboration with partners including Red Hat and Google.
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