samsung fab line


(iTers News) – What began as an also-ran turns into world-beater. More than one decade after it has flexed its chip design muscle on SOC, or system on chips, Samsung Electronics sees its foray pay off in a big way.


Closing a 3rd quarer financial performance, its SOC business turned out to contribute nearly half to its 3rd quarter sales of semiconductor chips, or about 4 trillion won on revenues.


Jumpstarting the growth momentums was mobile APs, or applications processor chips and CMOS image sensor chips.


Supplying global smartphone and tablet PC giants like Apple Inc. as well as huge captive markets for its smartphone and tablet PC business, Samsung takes the lion’s share of global AP chip markets, or 62.6%.


Meanwhile, Texas Instruments (TI), longtime market leader for mobile multimedia processors and baseband chips, slips into a distant No.2 position, accounting for 14.5%.


APs are the sort of SOC, or system-on-a chip, which power and work as a brain of tablet PCs and smartphones.


As the industry’s jargon SOC suggests, the AP chips are a combination of many functional circuitry blocks on a thumbnail-sized silicon die.


At the heart of the AP chip is a microprocessor core that that is made up of ALUs, or arithmetic and logic units and on-chip cache memory.


 


Journey up value chain


 


The likes of TI and Samsung Electronics license the microprocessor core from ARM Holding Inc., or other chip architecture maker, and then build other peripheral circuitries like memory controller blocks, data interface circuits, other functional IP blocks, as well as graphics cores, on their own, around it to fabricate AP chips.


Even if they don’t design microprocessor cores on their own, laying out and partitioning the whole system blocks is hardly an easy work, but requires rocket sciences. Especially for Samsung Electronics, who has mainly focused on memory chips for nearly 3 decades, it still represents a painstaking breakaway from its traditional way of memory chip-designing.


Samsung’s venture into lucrative SOC business dated back into late 1990s when the memory chip maker acquired Alpha CPU business from Compaq Inc. Yet, Samsung forsook the business for unknown reasons in early 2000s and then restarted as a foundry service provider for world’s leading-edge fabless SOC chip makers such as Xilinx Inc in early 2000s.


Dubbed as contract chip makers, or wafer suppliers, the foundries’ role is to just fabricate SOC chips of other chipmaker’s design, but no chip of their own. Yet, the foundry business has helped the chip maker to lay the groundwork for its SOC chip design.


Take its recent rollout of 32nm Exynox AP chip for example. Using the industry’s leading-edge 32nm high-k metal gate technology, the chip maker has laid out GPU cores and Codec accelerators, just to name two peripheral circuitries, around ARM Cortex-A9 processor to fabricate the Exynox AP chip with a 32nm geometry.


Samples of the 32nm Exynox AP chips will be available in the 4th quarter. To keep its growth momentums ups and running, the chip maker plans to tape out a 28nm AP chip next year.


 


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