For Samsung foundry business, one of the criticisms is that the company is slightly lacking in the advanced packaging business. Because, according to reports, as the manufacturing process reaches its limits, manufacturers can no longer rely solely on the violent reduction of crystal to achieve a dramatic increase in chip performance, so advanced packaging has become the new reliance of major manufacturers, Samsung's strongest competitor TSMC is also through this business layout, successfully took a number of new orders from customers.

However, Samsung's performance in this area is not as good as it should be, and reports about them in this area are rare. However, last year, Korean media BusinessKorea reported in high profile that Samsung's foundry business had formed a semiconductor packaging task force in mid-June of that year, which consisted of test and system packaging (TSP) engineers from Samsung's foundry division, researchers from the Semiconductor R&D Center, and memory and foundry divisions, and was expected to propose advanced packaging solutions and strengthen cooperation with customers.

Samsung's Chinese blog also wrote in a post published earlier this month that Moonsoo Kang, head of business development at Samsung Foundry, noted at the 2022 Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) that the Samsung Foundry team has been trying to open up "Beyond Moore's Law  The key to achieving this goal is the strong combination of advanced heterogeneous integration.

Based on this understanding, Samsung's foundry R&D department has developed three major advanced packaging technologies: I-Cube, H-Cube and X-Cube, along two directions: horizontal integration and vertical integration.

According to Samsung, the I-Cube is a 2.5D package solution in which the chips are placed side-by-side on an intermediary layer. In order to improve computing performance, I-Cube customers often request more area for the intermediary layer. In response, Samsung has introduced two I-Cube solutions: the I-CubeS and the I-CubeE.

The H-Cube, known as the Hybrid Cube, is another 2.5D package solution from Samsung. This solution is designed to address the severe shortage of cellular printed circuit boards (PCBs) that the semiconductor industry is currently facing.

The X-Cube is a full 3D packaging solution that uses chip vertical stacking technology. "X-Cube connects two vertically stacked die via micro-bumping or more advanced copper bonding technology. We plan to start volume production of micro-bump type X-Cube products in 2024 and copper bonded type X-Cube products in 2026." Kang said.

To better develop the company's packaging business, Samsung is also rumored to have roped in packaging expert Jun-Sung Lin, who has worked at TSMC for 19 years.

According to foreign media reports, Lin Juncheng is a senior expert in the field of semiconductor packaging, had worked in TSMC for 19 years from 1999 to 2017, during the coordination of TSMC registered more than 450 core patents in the United States, laying the foundation for the 3D advanced packaging technology that TSMC is now proud of. According to the information, it is Lin Juncheng who led the team to establish TSMC's proud advanced packaging technology product line CoWoS/InFO-PoP and smoothly introduced into mass production, obtaining large orders from major companies such as Nvidia and Apple. Later, he moved to Micron and led the Micron R&D team to establish 3DIC advanced packaging development product line and develop high frequency wide memory (HBM) stacking technology.

It is worth mentioning that before the poaching of Lin Juncheng, Samsung also poached the semiconductor expert Kim Woo-pyung from Apple and appointed him as the head of the U.S. Packaging Solutions Center.

Of course, Samsung cage talent does not necessarily mean that the company can succeed in this field, but at the very least they have taken another important step.

For Samsung, in order to its long-term goals, re-create its own cell phone chip is also very important. Because this is not only about the future development of its cell phone business, the company's future further expansion of PC, automotive chips and even more high-performance chip business also benefit greatly.

Watch the layout of this Korean chip giant in the past few years, they are also in this field step by step "win".

As early as 2019, there is news that Samsung will stop its own CPU core research, the company's Austin semiconductor plant is responsible for the business of research and development department plans to close on December 31, and dismissed the department's 290 employees, the other nearly 3,000 employees are not affected. Michele Glaze, then a spokeswoman for Samsung, confirmed the news and said the move was a difficult choice made to look at and evaluate the future of the business.

By May 2022, news broke that Samsung was creating an internal task force called the "Dream Platform One Team," a so-called "dream team" whose real purpose was to design a customized The real purpose of this so-called "Dream Team" is to design a customized Samsung mobile processor that can compete with Apple's M1 mobile processor-based Apple Silicon.

Earlier this month, reports citing sources familiar with the matter suggested that a Samsung team led by a former AMD senior engineer would accelerate development of the next-generation "Galaxy Chip(s)". The medium-term goal is to move its laptops and smartphones from Arm to internal CPU cores by 2027.

Samsung aims to use its own CPU cores for smartphones and laptops, the report said. The first processors based on this new development work are expected to be available in 2025, and they will drop the Exynos branding, calling them "Galaxy Chip(s)" instead. As you can see from the report, the first Galaxy Chip products are still likely to use CPU cores based on the Arm architecture. But sources suggest that if all goes according to plan, Samsung will be ready to launch its own architecture CPU cores by 2027. But Samsung later denied the claim of self-developed cores.

As another important component of its own chips, Samsung is also investing in GPUs to keep up with the times, and in this regard they have chosen to work with AMD.

In January 2022, Samsung announced the launch of a new high-end mobile processor, the Exynos 2200. one of the most important features of this newly designed mobile processor is the powerful Samsung Xclipse graphics processing unit (GPU) based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. Samsung said that the GPU called Xclipse between the console and mobile graphics processor, is a very special hybrid graphics processor. Based on the high-performance AMD RDNA 2 architecture, Xclipse inherits advanced graphics features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS) that were previously available only on PCs, laptops and game consoles.

DNA from the market response seems that Samsung this chip (including the GPU) are not as consumers and Samsung's expectations of it. Samsung has officially confirmed that its future Exynos family of mobile processors will continue to use AMD RDNA architecture-based GPUs, said Sungboem Park, Samsung's vice president of mobile GPU development. In addition, Samsung also plans to work closely with AMD to continue to use the RDNA series to achieve other functions.

In addition to mobile chips, Samsung has also made efforts in automotive chips.

In February, Businesskorea reported that Samsung Electronics hired Benny Katibian, formerly vice president of engineering at Qualcomm, as senior vice president of its U.S. company at the end of last year, and served as the core R&D center of Samsung Electronics America - Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC) and Advanced Computing Laboratory (ACL). SARC) and the Advanced Computing Laboratory (ACL), Samsung Electronics America's core R&D centers.

The hiring is part of Samsung Electronics' efforts to expand its automotive system-on-chip (SoC) business, which has significant growth potential, the report noted. Samsung Electronics' Systems LSI division has now launched Exynos Auto, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based automotive processor. Samsung's primary goal now is to upgrade Exynos Auto to strengthen its dominant market position.

The latest report from foreign media recently also shows that Samsung and Hyundai Motor's cooperation in the field of automotive chips is already underway, Samsung Electronics will design and manufacture for Hyundai, the latter plans to use for future models of advanced driver assistance systems and infotainment systems logic chip.

In a bid to realize the company's semiconductor ambitions, Samsung announced recently that it plans to spend about 300 trillion won ($229 billion) over the next 20 years to build a new chip cluster on the outskirts of Seoul, aiming to realize South Korea's ambition to lead the global chip manufacturing industry. As seen in the report, Samsung's investment will be a central part of the plan, while the goal is to build five memory and foundry fabs in a new chip cluster in Yongin City by 2042 to attract more than 150 local and foreign chip companies.

In addition to these operations, Samsung will continue to invest in CIS to achieve its goal of overtaking Sony. In terms of substrates, which are important for high-performance chips, Samsung announced last July that the company had started mass production of FC-BGA (overlay crystal-ball grid array package) for servers in Korea for the first time, and vowed to become the third largest IC packaging substrate factory in the world. Up to the time of the press release last year, Samsung Electro-Mechanics had invested $227 million in domestic production lines to produce next-generation substrates. Over the past two years, the company has spent 2 trillion won to expand its FC-BGA production facilities.

In addition, Samsung has followed in TSMC's footsteps by developing its own EUV photomask shields, and the company has many other layouts in terms of self-research and investment. In addition to the company's continued consolidation in the storage business. Samsung in the road to semiconductor domination, another important rely on the road.

Although the challenges are numerous, difficult or even failure. But Samsung has been on the way forward. This spirit of perseverance, but also worth the majority of domestic semiconductor practitioners to learn.