Samsung unveiled a whole host of new silicon technologies at its Annual Tech Day event in San Jose, California today. The agenda included a new premium mobile processor, a new 5G modem, the mass production of its latest DRAM and more.
Today's announcements show that Samsung is building on its strengths to become even more competitive in the semiconductor market. This market is of great importance of Samsung given that it accounts for a big chunk of the conglomerate's revenues.
A new premium mobile SoC and 5G modem were on the agenda
The Exynos 990 premium mobile SoC was one of the highlights of Tech Day 2019. It's accompanied by the 5G Exynos Modem 5123. Both chips are built on the most advanced 7nm process using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. Aside from generational enhancements, the Exynos 990 also comes with a 120Hz refresh-rate display driver, which could mean that Samsung phones with 120Hz displays may become a possibility next year.
The company also announced the mass production of its third-generation 10nm class 1z-nm DRAM. It's optimized for premium server platform development. This couldn't have come at a better time as data center customers are expected to ramp up their memory purchases in the final quarter of this year.
A spike in demand will help Samsung recoup the revenues that it has lost from this business over the past few quarters due to a supply glut. To that end, it also highlighted new business possibilities for next-generation memory technologies. This includes the company's 7th-generation V-NAND for premium memory solutions and next-generation PCIe Gen5 SSDs for storage and server applications.
Samsung unveiled its UFS-based 12GB LPDDR4X multichip package. It combines four 24Gb LPDDR4X chips with an ultra-fast eUFS 3.0 NAND storage in one single package. This will allow the company to go beyond the existing 8GB package limit in mid-range smartphones while also bringing more than 10GB of memory to the smartphone market at large.
The company also set up a demo pavilion at Tech Day 2019 to showcase the future of mobile and 5G, home automation, data centers and automotive technology. It engaged with some of the leading companies in Silicon Valley and highlighted customer collaborations on GPU, PCIe Gen4 and HBM2e technologies.
