|
SAN FRANCISCO -- At a press event here on Tuesday (June 3), South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. provided a progress report on its chip and flat-panel display businesses.
Samsung's LCD business is seeing strong growth, but the company's IC sector is showing mixed results so far in 2008. In ICs, its logic and foundry businesses are up. The memory business, which includes DRAMs and flash, remains challenging.
At the event, Jon Kang, president of the company's U.S. subsidiary, Samsung Semiconductor Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), dropped hints that the company remains ahead in the NAND flash technology race. Samsung has produced a 30-nm class NAND device, which enabled the development of a 64-gigabit (Gbit) chip, Kang said during the event.
The disclosure was an obvious swipe at the Intel-Micron duo, which recently announced a 34-nm NAND process that enabled a 32-Gbit chip.
Alan Niebel, chief executive of Web-Feet Research Inc. (Monterey, Calif.), said that Samsung has developed prototypes of a 30-nm class NAND device, but the company's production devices are in the 40-nm class. Samsung has talked about a 30-nm class NAND device for some time, he added.
The big question is whether or not the memory market will recover. The DRAM, NAND and NOR markets are in the midst of a major lull.
"The first half has been challenging for NAND," said Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, in an interview after the event. "We are cautiously optimistic in the second half."
Many of the traditional NAND markets are maturing. But one of the new NAND drivers is solid-state drives (SSDs). By 2010, SSDs will gobble up 10-to-15 percent of the world's NAND production, Elliot said.
To date, however, 50 or more vendors are selling SSDs, including the NAND flash players: Intel, Micron, Samsung and Toshiba. There are also a plethora of companies selling NAND controllers, including Samsung.
The outlook is also mixed for DRAMs. "The outlook is flat to slightly down'' in 2008, he said. "We are setting the groundwork for a recovery."
There are two major events taking place in DRAMs, which give vendors some ray of hope. First, a number of DRAM vendors, mostly in Taiwan, are cutting their capital spending. And second, PC unit shipments are expected to jump 13 percent this year, he added.
Unlike memory, there are some positive trends in the company's logic chip business. Samsung sells application processors, which has turned into a major business for the company. It has benefitted from major design wins for Apple's iPod and iPhone products.
Samsung also sells CMOS image sensors, DTV chips, DVD devices, among others. Samsung's logic business has seen a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent from 2001 to 2007, said Richard Yeh, director of marketing for Samsung Semiconductor's LSI business. "Our business has been a great growth story," he said.
The company claims to be the world's largest chip maker in yet another market: portable navigation devices. In this field, Samsung is shipping ARM-based processors, build around a 65-nm process.
One emerging portable navigation vendor, Dash Navigation Inc., is using Samsung's 400-MHz S3C2440 processor. The product, Dash Express, collects data from people driving real commute routes and during real commutes times.
Not to be outdone, Samsung has also cracked the top-10 in the foundry market in terms of sales. Samsung is part of IBM's ''fab club,'' which has helped propel the company into a contender in the leading-edge foundry business.
''Customers want choices," said Ana Molnar Hunter, vice president of technology for Samsung Semiconductor's System LSI Foundry Business.
Samsung is in foundry production at the 65-nm node and has delivered prototypes at 45-nm, Hunter said. Samsung is "on the fence" in terms of developing a half-step 40-nm process technology, she said.
IBM, Chartered and Samsung are also developing a 32-nm process. IBM is set to ship wafers by the end of 2009, with the other partners slated to deliver product a quarter later. "Our 32-nm technology looks pretty good,'' she added.
After six months of domination by the once-unknown brand Vizio Inc., the North American LCD-TV market in the fourth quarter of 2007 saw the return of more established names to the top sales ranks -- Samsung and Sony.
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. in the fourth quarter became the number-one seller of LCD-TVs in North America, with its unit-shipment market share rising to 14.2 percent, up from 12.8 percent in the third quarter, according to iSuppli. The South Korean company was ranked second in the third quarter. |