Samsung- 5 nm is Not a Limit to Silicon Scaling

Speaking at IMEC's Technology Forum this week...Kinam Kim of Samsung Electronics asserted that he believes silicon scaling will continue far beyond the nanometer range....

Kinam Kim of Samsung Electronics noted that some people in industry say the limit of scaling is ~5 nm, to which he said, "I do not agree." In fact, he said he believes that there are various possible paths to overcome obstacles of silicon scaling to continue to grow the silicon industry far beyond the nanometer range. Kim, executive vice president and general manager of Samsung's Semiconductor R&D Center and Samsung Fellow, presented at IMEC's Technology Forum in Brussels, Belgium, this week.

Kim said that despite the global economic recession and slowdown of semiconductor markets, most notably memory, several emerging drivers exist in healthcare, IT, automotive, aerospace and robotics, and will be strong engines for silicon growth in the future. Healthcare alone will become predictive, preventive and personalized, using such technologies as biogenics. Advanced robots will use a variety of sensors, combined with computing power, to perform any number of tasks. It will be the incumbent applications of the semiconductor industry, well-known applications in wireless computing and entertainment, which will feed into these emerging applications... Samsung is optimistic that EUV double patterning (NA=0.25, 0.32, then 0.6) will take patterning to several nanometers in 2014.. Additional details

Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief -- Semiconductor International, 6/4/2009http://www.semiconductor.net/article/278328-Samsung_s_Kim_Claims_No_Limit_to_Scaling.php

SSD Market Share and Sales with Breakdown by Density

Revenues for the SSD market (including low-cost PC solutions) worldwide totaled US$585 million in 2008, rising over 100% from US$259 million in 2007, according to a recent report released by Gartner. PC applications contributed around 58% to the total market for SSDs last year.Samsung Electronics led the market with 31.7% revenue market share in 2008, up 14.8 percentage points from 16.9% in 2007, the Gartner report shows. The research firm attributed the significant share growth to increased adoption of Samsung's drives in mainstream PC models.STEC was second with 15.7% last year, according to the report. In addition to OEM orders placed by EMC and Sun Microsystems, STEC has recently cut into the supply chain with SSDs used in Apple's products. Meanwhile, SanDisk came in third with 9.4%, facing tougher competition from recent entrant Intel. Intel climbed to fourth with 6.9% in 2008, compared to less than 1% that it took in 2007.
See breakdown by sale, density, type (Low-cost PCs, Mainstream PCs, Enterprise SSD)


From Digitimes / Josephine Lien, Taipei; Jessie Shen,