Electronics

In the current Android mobile phone market, Samsung's position is almost difficult to shake. This is not only because Samsung's market share has been ranked first for a long time, but also because Samsung has a deep accumulation in electronic products: Samsung can basically adopt its own screens, processors, batteries, etc. needed to manufacture mobile phones.

However, it is undeniable that exynos chip cannot compete with Samsung's rival Apple in performance. However, there has been relevant news recently that Samsung seems to continue to invest heavily in the chip business to improve its product experience.

Samsung currently has the flagship mobile phone chip "exynos" produced by the group's semiconductor business and device solutions division (DS Division). In addition, Samsung also partially purchases Qualcomm and MediaTek mobile phone chips. However, in its flagship models, Samsung has combined its own chips with Qualcomm chips.

For example, in the European and Korean markets, most of Samsung's flagship S-Series mobile phones will carry Samsung's own chips, but in the Chinese market, Xiaolong's flagship mobile platform is generally selected. Previously, it was reported that due to the poor performance of exynos on mobile phones, Samsung plans to replace exynos with Qualcomm mobile platform in some markets.

The high-end chips required for smart phones depend on Qualcomm's Samsung Electronics. It plans to set up a new self-developed chip R & D team in July this year. The goal is to commercialize the first Galaxy dedicated chip by 2025, and its performance will surpass that of Apple's self-developed chip.

It is reported that the formation of a new Samsung chip R & D team is in progress. The name of the special team is "dream platform one team", which is jointly led by the director of the mobile experience (MX) business department and the director of the system LSI business department. The development personnel of the Samsung system LSI Department "exynos" and the personnel of the MX department will participate in it. The working group may have more than 1000 members.

According to the data of counterpoint research, Samsung accounted for 18.9% of the high-end smartphone market last year, higher than Apple's 17.2%, Xiaomi's 13.5%, oppo's 11.4% and vivo's 9.6%, but in terms of sales, Apple's sales in the smartphone market was $196billion, far higher than Samsung's $72billion.

Apple began to develop a series of self-developed chips for iPhone and other consumer products in 2011. By creating a closed ecosystem covering software and hardware, apple allows consumers to use their own products based on a single ID identification, and can connect seamlessly. A South Korean industry official said: "there is no ecosystem like apple. It is only a matter of time before Samsung lags behind Chinese brands."

At the same time, Samsung will make its own advanced process wafers OEM and train troops through the 5g flagship chip of self-developed advanced process, so as to maintain the capacity utilization of the wafer factory and catch up with TSMC.

Samsung has previously announced that its 3nm process using the surround gate technology (GAA) architecture will enter the production stage in the first half of this year, leading TSMC. However, according to the previous disclosure, the yield of Samsung 3nm GAA process has just reached 10%~20%, and the yield of 4nm process is only 35%.

According to the analysis of industry insiders, Samsung is the global leader in smart phones, and its huge sales of mobile phones have become the best outlet for its self-developed chips. In particular, the flagship chips must be produced by the most advanced process. Samsung intends to build a new dedicated chip for the flagship model, which will be used to train troops for advanced process, improve yield and process technology, catch up with TSMC, and enable the FAB to maintain high capacity utilization.

"Dream platform one team" may bring rapid progress to Samsung's chip business, but we still need to wait for time to verify.