Samsung Electronics unveiled the "smart & green plus" strategy at the 2010 Samsung mobile solution forum held in Taiwan on Sept. 7.
"The strategy reflects Samsung's strong will to lead the world's mobile semiconductor industry with high-function, low electric power and environment-friendly semiconductors," Kwon Oh-hyun, President of the semiconductor business of Samsung Electronics, said at the forum.
"Under the strategy, Samsung will lead the new mobile environment in the world with smarter solutions with high function, and greener solutions with low consumption electric power," said the president.
"At the same time, we will effectively cope with changes in the new mobile market environment by strengthening the win-win partnership between semiconductor manufacturers and set makers," he said.
"Samsung also plans to expand the "green memory campaign" to three fields - server, PC and mobile. Through updating their green memory campaign website, the company expects to introduce four top green memory products - DDR3, SSD, LPDDR2 and GDDR5," said Kwon.
At the mobile forum, Samsung introduced new mobile semiconductor products in keeping with the smart & green plus strategy, including 1GHz dual core application processor designed on low-power process technology, a high-performance 16gigabyte moviNANDTM chip with an eMMC4.41 interface, and an engineering sample of the world's first application processor utilizing 32 nanometer (nm) low-power process technology.
About 1,000 executives and officials of Samsung Electronics, Acer, Lenovo, and other Samsung's business partners attended the international forum.
It is the seventh Samsung mobile solution forum, for which the company invites its major business partners to discuss and share information on new mobile trends and new semiconductor technologies.
Hyun also said, "Beyond thin smartphones, alternative form factors are emerging as mainstream mobile devices for personal computing and communication. Also the introduction of new mobile software is enriching and expanding the user experience for 'on the go' consumers.
"The smart & green plus strategy underscores the value that core technologies bring to the overall mobile ecosystem and the importance of a healthy ecosystem in the timely emergence of new mobile applications."
At the forum, presenters provided in-depth reports that are seen to be key smart and green components with detailed discussion of software competitiveness and system implementation, which largely rely on successful partnerships between component manufacturers and system enablers.
Guest speakers from industry research firm, iSuppli, and a leading electronic design automation company, Synopsys, also shared insight on the rapidly evolving mobile industry. They addressed concerns about the challenges of systemic collaboration in a multi-faceted and increasingly complex industry.
Mass production of 30-nano DRAM chips
Samsung Electronics began to mass produce 30-nano DRAM chips for the first time in the world in June this year.
"Since June 21, Samsung has been mass-producing 30-nano 2Gb DDR3 (Double Data Rate 3) DRAM chips," a company spokesman said.
"Our 30nano-class process technology will provide the most advanced low-power DDR3 available today and therein the most efficient DRAM solutions anywhere for the introduction of consumer electronics devices and server systems," said the spokesman.
"The new product will lower power consumption to 85 percent of existing 40-nanometer DRAM chips. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Along with this, the technology will also improve productivity by as much as 60 percent, as each DRAM chip will take up a smaller space on the production line," he said.
DRAM is a type of memory that stores data in a separate electronic component within a circuit.
Based on the new nano technology, DDR3, which is emerging as the predominant main DRAM memory this year, is expected to be used in a broader range of products, from servers to notebooks, desktops, and future versions of Netbooks and mobile devices, the Samsung spokesman said.
Introduction of 512GB SSD products
Samsung, the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology solutions, introduced the first solid state drive (SSD) utilizing high-performance toggle-mode DDR NAND for mass production in June.
The new 512 gigabyte (GB) SSD provides electronic data processing application designers with advanced performance and reliability for notebooks with premium value.
"The highly advanced features and characteristics of our new SSD were obtained as a direct result of an aggressive push for further development of our NAND flash technology, our SSD controller and our supportive SSD firmware," the spokesman said.
"Early introduction of this state-of-the-art toggle DDR solution will enable Samsung to play a major role in securing faster market acceptance of the new wave of high-end SSD technology," he added.
The new 512GB SSD makes use of a 30 nanometer-class 32 gigabit chip that the company began producing last November.
The toggle-mode DDR structure together with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum sequential read speed of 250 Megabyte per second (MBps) and a 220MBps sequential write speed, both of which provide three-fold the performance of a typical hard disk drive, he explained.
"At these speeds, two standard length DVD movies (approximately 4GB each) can be stored in just a minute," said the spokesman.
Samsung provides further gains in power efficiency by having developed a low-power controller specifically for toggle-mode DDR NAND. The resulting power throttling capability enables the drive's high-performance levels without any increase in power consumption over a 40nm-class 16Gb NAND-based 256GB SSD.
Meanwhile, Samsung produced the industry's first multi-chip package (MCP) with phase-change RAM (PRAM) for use in mobile phones.
The 512-megabit (512Mb) PRAM in the MCP is backward compatible with 40nm-class NOR flash memory in both its hardware and software functionality, providing handset designers the convenience of having multi-chip packaging fully compatible with past stand-alone PRAM chip technology, the spokesman said.
