Samsung has announced plans to make huge strides in the automotive industry with next-generation technologies such as LPDDR5x, GDDR7 and AutoSSD. At the "2023 Investor Forum" held in Hong Kong, Samsung Electronics revealed that the company plans to establish its dominant position in the automotive memory market in the next few years. The company hopes to target the fast-growing "autonomous driving" segment, where in-vehicle components such as memory and other technologies play a crucial role in a product's functionality.
Samsung believes that the car market has the potential for a huge economic upturn, driven by the artificial intelligence boom. It is reported that the current size of the automotive system semiconductor market is US$50 billion, and the average annual growth rate is expected to reach 17% in the next five years (2023-2028), exceeding the mobile (6%) and high-performance computing (12%) fields. Numbers like that mean business for companies, especially Samsung because they have both semiconductor and memory solutions, giving them an advantage over other companies.
To meet the computing needs of the "artificial intelligence-inspired" automotive industry, Samsung plans to release a new variant of its cutting-edge LPDDR5X memory, which is rumored to be half the size but offer 20% better performance. The upgraded memory chip has a capacity ranging from 2GB to 24GB, a speed of up to 68GB/s, a bandwidth of 8.5Gbps per channel, and a 561FBGA package, which is very suitable for large-scale industry applications.
In addition to new memory technology, the South Korean giant also plans to launch a removable automotive solid-state drive (SSD) next year, which will mainly improve data efficiency by implementing storage virtualization so that a single SSD can be partitioned for use by multiple SoCs, making performance upgrades more convenient. It is rumored that the capacity of automotive solid-state drives is 512GB-4TB and the speed is as high as 6.5GB/s. They could be game-changers for self-driving cars, especially in the context of assisted and autonomous driving.
Finally, the company once again reviewed the development of the GDDR7 memory type, claiming that it can play a huge role in achieving higher levels of autonomous driving. GDDR7 is expected to have a bandwidth of 32Gbps per channel and a large data transmission speed of 128GB/s.
Samsung is playing a key role in the transition to next-generation capabilities, with the company currently aiming to dominate the autonomous driving industry by 2025, primarily through advancements in its memory and storage portfolio.