Samsung shows confidence in HBM, portrays next-gen road map

Samsung Electronics Chief Technology Officer Song Jai-hyuk speaks during his keynote speech for SEMICON Korea 2026 at Coex in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

Samsung Electronics Chief Technology Officer Song Jai-hyuk said Wednesday the company’s high-bandwidth memory 4 (HBM4) chip is showing “good” manufacturing yield, adding that clients have expressed strong satisfaction with its performance.

“We may have fallen short of demonstrating our world-class technological responsiveness to customer needs for a while, but this should be seen as a return to that standard,” Song told reporters before his keynote speech for SEMICON Korea 2026 in Seoul.

Samsung reportedly plans to begin HBM4 mass production and shipping to major customers later this month. Its HBM4 chips are using its 1c process, the sixth-generation 10-nanometer-class DRAM technology, for the DRAM cell die, while using a 4-nanometer foundry process for the base die.

Based on these technologies, Samsung had its HBM4 chips achieve data processing speeds of up to 11.7 gigabits per second (Gbps), exceeding the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council’s standard of 8 Gbps.

Since they are the industry’s latest technologies, questions have been raised over how the company will secure production yield as operations ramp up, but Song expressed confidence.

“It is difficult to describe (the yield) in numbers, but I can say the status is very good,” he said, adding that customers are “very satisfied” with the performance of the chip.

“In terms of technology, we believe we remain at the top. The question of how we manage our portfolio falls into the realm of business … We believe our in-house capabilities spanning memory, foundry and packaging create the best environment for making artificial intelligence (AI)-driven products, and the combination is generating synergy.”

Samsung Electronics Chief Technology Officer Song Jai-hyuk speaks to reporters at SEMICON Korea 2026 in southern Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Nam Hyun-woo

During his keynote speech, Song stressed Samsung Electronics’ advantage as a company capable of foundry, memory and chip packaging businesses, saying it will demonstrate a “distinctive and powerful Samsung-only semiconductor synergy through co-optimization.”

To cope with growing workloads required for AI accelerators, Song said Samsung is considering custom HBM based on a compute-in-base-die architecture, which allows part of the workload typically handled by graphics processing units and other logic chips to be processed by the memory’s base die. Through this approach, he predicted power efficiency could be improved by up to 2.8 times.

He also introduced a technology dubbed zHBM, in which HBM is stacked vertically on top of logic chips, saying it could deliver another major leap in bandwidth and power efficiency. Under this architecture, bandwidth is expected to increase fourfold, while power consumption could be reduced to one-quarter of current levels.

SK hynix Senior Vice President Lee Sung-hoon also shared the outlook that the semiconductor industry will face unprecedented technological challenges for the next 10 years, and that the industry can find a breakthrough through AI-driven research and data collaboration across the chip ecosystem.

SEMICON Korea, the country’s largest semiconductor industry fair, kicked off its three-day run at Coex in southern Seoul the same day. This year’s edition is the largest of its kind, with more than 550 companies in the semiconductor value chain participating, including Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, Intel, Kioxia, Micron, ASML and Applied Materials. More than 75,000 people have signed up to attend the event, according to SEMI Korea.

Under the theme of Transform Tomorrow, the event will feature more than 30 sessions where over 200 experts and other speakers will discuss advanced manufacturing technologies, AI, market trends and other key topics in the industry.