Electronics Giant Unveils Three Next-Generation Products


By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter


Samsung Electronics, the world’s leading chipmaker, Monday took the wraps off its three next-generation products including a 60-nanometer, 8-gigabit (Gb) NAND flash memory.

``We will start to pump out these 60-nanometer flash memories from the latter part of next year. With this, I am sure we will be able to remain ahead of the pack,’’ said Samsung president Hwang Chang-gyu, who is in charge of the firm’s semiconductor business.

Hwang predicted the 8Gb flash memory will revolutionize our daily lives as it enables people to store 4,000 MP3 files or 16 hours of movies.

He added Samsung would be able to expand the technology gap with its global rivals, which are now pulling out all stops to develop a 70-nanometer, 4Gb flash memory, which are the processors Samsung unveiled last year.

With the 8-Gb product, Hwang also verified his prediction that the processing power of the top-of-the-line flash memory chips will double every 12 months.

``The industry has seen densities of top-line flash memories grow from 256 Megabit (Mb) in 1999, to 512Mb in 2000, 1Gb in 2001, 2Gb in 2002, 4Gb in 2003 and now 8Gb in 2004,’’ he said.

Compared to Moore’s Law, which says the processing power of state-of-the-art computer chips will double every 18 months, the hypothesis is often called Hwang’s Law.

Thanks to characteristics offering fast-read access times and solid-state shock resistance, flash memory is popular for applications such as storage on battery-powered devices like cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Flash memory is made in two forms; NAND flash, whose market is dominated by Samsung, and Intel-dominated NOR flash. Samsung accounted for about 65 percent of the $4.2 billion worth global NAND flash market last year.

Plus, Samsung came out with a pair of other world-first products of 2-Gb DDR SDRAM based on 80-nanometer process technology and 667MHz mobile CPU for third-generation cell phones.

``Mobile and digital consumer applications are the new driving forces of the info-tech era. Through synergies created between the memory and non-memory divisions, Samsung will support the new trends with total semiconductor solutions,’’ Hwang said.

Unlike his upbeat assessment on cutting-edge products, however, he was negative on the outlook for global semiconductor sales next year, predicting halved growth from this year.

``Global semiconductor sales growth will come in at around 10 percent next year, following estimated growth of 20 percent this year,’’ Hwang said.

He predicted the worldwide market would hit the $220 billion mark this year and the figure would expand to somewhere between $240 billion and $250 billion.

voc200@koreatimes.co.kr