Samsung's Grand Blueprint to Rival TSMC: Collaborative Foundry Ecosystem, Expanded IP Portfolio

Samsung Electronics announces a game-changing plan to become the world's top contract chip manufacturer, seeking to outpace Taiwan's TSMC. This strategic move involves collaborating with IP partners like Synopsys, Cadence, and Alphawave to establish a comprehensive foundry ecosystem, optimizing product development across various applications from AI to mobile devices.

Samsung will provide its IP partners, such as Synopsys, Cadence, and Alphawave, with the essential foundry manufacturing data required to strengthen its partnership. This will allow them to develop IP optimized specifically for Samsung's foundry process and provide it to fabless customers both inside and outside of South Korea.

This holistic partnership will include a spectrum of foundry applications covering diverse sectors, including AI, high-performance computing, graphics processing, automobiles, and mobile devices.

Samsung announced that it would be disclosing the full content of these agreements, as well as its IP roadmap strategy, at the Samsung Foundry Forum in San Jose on June 28. The company aims to attract new fabless customers, enhance its capabilities to support customers' development work, and proactively secure essential IP for various customers in the areas of artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, graphics processing, automobiles, and mobile devices. Booyah!

This allows both domestic and foreign fabless customers to improve their product development, ultimately reducing errors from the early design stage while significantly shortening the time and cost from prototype production to verification and mass production.

Samsung's expanded IP portfolio will cover chips ranging from 3 nanometers to 8 nanometers, giving customers access to IP optimized for Samsung's foundry process at any stage of their product development. The company emphasizes that this will significantly reduce errors from the early design phase while dramatically shortening the time and associated costs from prototype production to mass production.

Moreover, Samsung plans to enable the latest DDR5 8400+ and GDDR7 solutions on Samsung Foundry's advanced SF3 technology, ensuring a future-proof migration path for leading customers designing generative AI/ML.

Since creating a new foundry division in 2017, Samsung has consistently increased its number of IP partners and the number of its IP offerings, now numbering over 4,000. This move is intended to attract new fabless customers and pave the way for Samsung to excel in the competitive contract chip manufacturing landscape.

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