Samsung Electronics will be unveiling its new technologies for foundry processes at global forums, presenting the company’s roadmap aimed at becoming the global top two foundry business after Taiwan’s TSMC, it said on Monday.
The South Korean memory giant will hold the Samsung Foundry Forum in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday, and other major cities for the next five months to announce its technological roadmap for chip customers and focus on expanding its presence in the global foundry market.
The company has been running the series of conferences since 2015 as part of efforts to strengthen its foundry business.
Although Samsung is the world’s top memory provider, it has been the fourth player in the foundry market with a 7.4 percent share.
It has vowed to reach $10 billion in sales this year -- more than doubling from last year -- to rise to the second largest.
S3 foundry manufacturing line in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province (Samsung Newsroom)
In order to attract more foundry customers, Samsung has launched the Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem program early this year, which provides design tools for automation systems.
It has also begun providing the Multi Project Wafer service for its key customers to produce a variety of different chips on a single wafer.
At the upcoming forums, the company is expected to present a series of the newest technologies focusing on 7-nanometer process, communications chip technologies for internet of things and also for fingerprint sensors, according to industry watchers.
Samsung has vowed to complete development of the 7-nanometer process technologies by this year.
When the new Extreme Ultra Violet lithography line in its Hwaseong campus is completed early next year, Samsung will start mass producing chips for the fifth-generation network on the 7-nm process at the new plant.
“Top officials of the foundry business will take part in the planned events to talk about their latest innovations in process technology, design tools, design services and packaging technologies for new applications,” said a Samsung official.
According to the company’s technological roadmap announced last year, it plans to develop 5-nm process technologies by 2019 and 4-nm process technologies by 2020.
“Details of the new process technologies are likely to be unveiled at this year’s forums, but we are yet allowed to confirm,” the official said.
By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)
