Samsung CTO urges chipmakers to cooperate for AI-driven future
Song Jai-hyuk, chief technology officer of Samsung Electronics' memory chip division, delivers his keynote speech for SEMICON Korea 2025 at COEX in southern Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap
Samsung Electronics Chief Technology Officer Song Jai-hyuk stressed the importance of cooperation between players in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip supply chain, saying their collaborative efforts can overcome increasing challenges in developing advanced semiconductors.
Song made the remarks during his keynote speech at SEMICON Korea 2025, the local semiconductor industry's biggest conference, which kicked off its three-day run at COEX in southern Seoul, Wednesday.
“To sustain AI technology, (chip) performance has to be faster while consuming less power, and this requires customized semiconductor technology,” Song said. “However, the difficulty in developing such chips has increased, with developments that used to take one year now require two to three years.”
He noted that the chip industry can step beyond such technological limits through packaging technologies, but stressed that industry cooperation is critical for AI technologies' further evolution.
“AI has made substantial progress during the past 80 years, but it still has much to learn compared to the human brain, which has undergone 3.4 billion years of evolution,” he said.
“Semiconductors are essential to supporting key technologies of the AI era, highlighted by autonomous vehicles, high-speed computing, quantum computing and humanoid robots. A better future for all of humanity can be achieved through collaboration within the semiconductor industry.”
A semiconductor wafer is displayed at a booth of SEMICON Korea 2025 at COEX in southern Seoul, Wednesday. Newsis
Song’s comments came amid the increasing importance of packaging and other back-end processes in the chip industry. More and more chipmakers are finding limits in making further progress in front-end processes due to the limits of making node dimensions finer or packing transistors more densely.
To improve cost efficiency, power consumption and manufacturing yield, the chip industry is now turning its eyes on the chiplet, which combines modular components of chips serving various purposes into a single packaging. This means not only front-end chipmakers, such as Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, but also packaging firms should cooperate closer than before.
“In order to produce the most widely used chiplets, not only chipmakers like Samsung Electronics but also design firms, material suppliers, research institutes and universities must come together,” Song said.
Visitors wait in line to enter SEMICON Korea 2025 at COEX in southern Seoul, Wednesday. Newsis
During the first day of the conference, Gaurav Gupta, an analyst of U.S. consulting firm Gartner, anticipated that the global semiconductor market is expected to achieve a 12.7 percent growth this year, as the AI processor market and the analog chip market are estimated to recover. He also noted that the AI-specific high-bandwidth memory will account for 30.6 percent in the entire DRAM market in 2028.
Marking its 26th edition, SEMICON Korea 2025 took place under the theme of “Lead the Edge.” More than 500 exhibitors including ASML set up 2,301 booths, and the event organizers expect more than 70,000 people will visit the show.