[단독] Samsung folds its own semiconductor design

Enter 2021.03.19 06:00

Samsung Electronics has virtually stopped designing its own chip for automotive semiconductors. Samsung Electronics launched a vehicle semiconductor brand in 2018, setting up a strategy to expand its business area to not only the mobile but also the automobile market. However, as the company decided that the profitability of its own design was low, it turned its business strategy toward receiving only orders for designing semiconductor chips for vehicles from customers.

According to the semiconductor industry on the 18th, Samsung Electronics disbanded the’A-Project Team’ within the System LSI Division in the Device Solution (DS) division through personnel and organizational reorganization in December 2020. Two of the four executive-level researchers in the A-project team moved to the custom SOC business team within the business unit, and the remaining members moved to the memory solution development room and the AI&SW research center of Korea Advanced Institute of Technology, respectively.

This team was established at the end of December 2018. He was in charge of designing the electrical equipment, such as the automotive processor brand’Exynos Auto’ and the image sensor brand’Isocell Auto’.

Exynos Auto raised expectations for full-scale mass production starting with the installation on the Audi A4 model. However, there is no final mass production plan of the news of the deployment of the company’s 5G-based’digital cockpit’ in 2020.

In the semiconductor industry, it seems that Samsung Electronics has focused on selecting and focusing on supporting customer chip designs rather than self-design, as semiconductor chips for vehicles are less viable than those for smartphones.

The suspension of the so-called’Mongoose Project’ is also believed to have had a decisive influence on the dissolution of the A-project team. Samsung Electronics has formed its own development team in Austin, USA and invested in technology development since the early 2010s in order to acquire the ability to design CPU cores independently. The project’s name, mongoose, refers to mammals that prey on vipers.

However, Samsung Electronics stopped the Mongoose project in October 2019, as it was evaluated that its own mobile CPU core was inferior in power consumption efficiency, heat generation, and multi-core efficiency compared to competitor products such as Qualcomm. With this decision, 300 local CPU R&D personnel went through the dismissal procedure.

An official from the semiconductor industry said, “Exynos Auto was designed based on the Mongoose core, and it seems that the development team that led it was dismantled and the vehicle semiconductor design project itself also lost its strength.”

Instead of dismantling the A-Project Team, Samsung Electronics increased the number of researchers from 1 to 5 researchers in the System LSI Business Unit Custom SOC Business Team, which was newly established in 2020.

It is known that the custom SOC business team recently won an order for a semiconductor chip project for the next-generation autonomous vehicle of’Waymo’, a subsidiary of Google’s autonomous driving division. After the design of the custom SOC business team is completed, the possibility of production through the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process of the foundry business unit of Samsung Electronics is raised.

An official from Samsung Electronics explained, “There were some changes in the automotive semiconductor design organization in terms of business efficiency,” and “It is difficult to say that the design itself has quit.”

Reporter Lee Kwang-young [email protected]

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