Samsung Electronics Device Solutions (Semiconductor & Display) history

The first was the 1981 Long-Term Semiconductor Industry Promotion Plan.

A yearlong feasibility study began at their new Suwon semiconductor R&D center in January 1982.471

In March 1983, they began producing a PC, the SPC-1000.

Korea Mobile Telecommunications Services (KMTS, later to be known as SK Telecom) launched its 0G radio telephone network in April 1984, grabbing 2658 subscribers by the end of the year.

To break free from licensing fees, the Samsung Santa Clara research team designed a 256Kb DRAM through reverse engineering, sampling an all-new part in July 1985.

Lee Kun-Hee assumed control of the firm on December 1, 1987, barely two weeks after his father’s passing.

KMTS was upgrading their network to 1G cellular, with an AMPS infrastructure rollout that would be ready to launch by July 1988 – just in time for the Seoul 1988 Summer Olympic Games.

After rounds of complex negotiation, Qualcomm and Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) reached a joint technology development agreement for CDMA infrastructure in May 1991.

Toshiba had developed a new technology – NAND flash memory – but was losing ground quickly to Intel who was outproducing them on a NOR flash alternative (with different application characteristics). To close the capacity gap, Toshiba licensed its NAND flash design to Samsung in December 1992.

Samsung had caught the pack in DRAM. With massive fab investments of $500M or more for five consecutive years to get running on 200mm wafers, Samsung vaulted over Toshiba to become global DRAM market share leader in 1993.

The SH-700 initially sold 6,000 units a month, and by April 1994 was selling 16,000 units a month.

In a unique arrangement, Korean manufacturers paid a percentage of their handset selling price as a royalty, and Qualcomm helped fund further joint development effort with ETRI. SK Telecom IS-95A CDMA service was ready in Seoul in January 1996.

More ahead in Chapter 9.) Exports of a modified SCH-1011 phone to Sprint in the US started in June 1997.

Some of the phones appearing in 1998: the SCH-800 CDMA flip phone with SMS messaging, the SPH-4100 PCS phone setting a new lightweight mark of 98g, and the SGH-600 GSM phone that helped European exports.

The Samsung SH-100 handheld 1G phone debuted in 1988. It sold fewer than 2000 units, mostly to VIPs, and it too suffered in quality.

Most players had an 8-bit MCU for the user interface, a DSP for the MP3 decoding, flash to store the MP3 files, and a USB chip for connecting to a PC. In August 2001, Samsung announced a new chipset called the CalmRISC Portable Audio Device (C-PAD) for MP3 player OEMs and use in its Yepp lines.

In July 2002, ARM and Samsung announced a comprehensive longterm licensing agreement.

Samsung tested the waters with the SGHD700, a Symbian flip phone sporting an unusual camcorder-style rotating screen and lens, demonstrated at a special event in September 2003 but never launched.

Pushing its process further, Samsung opened its 300mm S1 line in Giheung in mid-2005, establishing production of DRAM on a 90nm process by the end of the year.

In April 2006, Samsung announced plans for Fab A2 at its Austin complex, adding a 300mm line in a new larger building.

Starting the sequence, the 90nm S5L8900 with its ARM11 core shipped in the original iPhone in June 2007 and the iPod Touch in September 2007.

In April 2008 Lee was indicted on charges of breach of trust and tax evasion as a part of a scheme, and shortly thereafter he resigned as chairman of Samsung.

By 2010, we’d launched an app store for TVs, ushering in the era of smart, connected televisions.

First sampled in November 2011 was the Exynos 5 Dual, with two new ARM Cortex-A15 cores at 2.0 GHz, also on 32nm HKMG. The Exynos 5250 doubled memory bandwidth to 12.8 GB/sec, and used the ARM Mali-T604 MP4 GPU clocked at 533 MHz.

Following in April 2012 was the Exynos 4 Quad, a 1.4 GHz Cortex-A9 quad core again in 32nm HKMG. To help with power consumption, the Exynos 4412 used power gating and per-core frequency and voltage scaling on all four cores.

At Mobile World Congress 2014, Samsung rolled out the Exynos 5422.

That would be an interesting twist given the drama surrounding the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S6 on March 1, 2015.