By Kim Yoo-chul
Samsung Electronics said Friday it has formed a business alliance with a Swiss semiconductor solutions firm to promote their foundry business
The world's largest memory chipmaker said that it will cooperate with STMicroelectronics to develop 32- and 28-nanometer processing technology from this month.
It’s the first time for Samsung to announce strategic tie-up with a top-notch semiconductor manufacturer in the logic chip business, which Samsung officials say is a ``milestone’’ for the Korean technology giant. Logic chip refers to microprocessor or a computer processor on a microchip.
STMicroelectronics, headquartered in Geneva, is the seventh largest in the world. Under the partnership, Samsung will produce logic chips by using an advanced high-K metal gate technology.
``We welcome the partnership. Samsung has been maintaining constructive partnership with STMicro. Samsung has so far been jointly developing 32- and 28-nano logic chip technologies via the International Semiconductor Development Alliance (ISDA),’’ said Samsung spokesman Ken Noh.
The firm plans to increase its production volume at STMicro as a part of its strategy to boost its foundry or contract-based logic chip business, according to Samsung officials.
Unlike the highly volatile and cyclical conventional memory chip business, logic chips are much more profitable because they are used to control entire computing systems not just used to read and write the data.
``The confirmation of the partnership with STMicro has significance as customers’ reluctance to come to Samsung for logic chips has been broken,’’ said a senior Samsung executive by telephone.
Officials say this latest partnership is to enlist other potential foundry customers and address the viability of using Samsung’s 28-nanometer gate-first process to redesign gate-last chips. Samsung has also started producing logic chips for Qualcomm.
``As far as I know, wafer allocation to STMicroelectronics is increasing. That means our logic chip business volume is rising, therefore additional logic chip-making facilities will be needed next year,’’ the executive said.
``We would argue that Samsung already makes some of the most sophisticated application products on the market running some of the best handsets (A5, A6 in most Apple, and Exynos in Samsung handsets). We don’t rule out Samsung adding Texas Instruments and Nvidia in the future,’’ said Keon Han, an analyst from a major research firm CreditSuisse.
Noh from Samsung said the company will massively ramp up production of logic chips using 32- and 28-nanometer level technology and actively respond to calls from clients, though he declined to confirm whether Samsung has partnered with Qualcomm or Texas and Nvidia.