Seen is a Samsung Electronics’ booth at the Flash Memory Summit 2022 held in Santa Clara, Calif, Aug.3, 2022.Samsung Electronics and SK hynix will join this year’s event, which will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara from Aug.8 to 10.Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
By Baek Byung-yeul
Samsung Electronics and SK hynix will unveil their latest products and technologies at next month’s Flash Memory Summit, the world’s largest flash memory chip event, in the U.S., hoping to make a breakthrough in the chip industry, which is suffering one of its worst ever downturns due to high inventory levels and persistent weak demand, according to the industry officials, Sunday.
The Flash Memory Summit is the largest event in the flash memory semiconductor industry as global companies and prominent figures gather at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California to share new technologies and market trends.This year’s event will take place from Aug.8 to 10.
Unlike the 2022 event that focused on data center-related products, this year’s event is expected to cover storage trends in the emerging automotive market, which is expected to become a new income source for flash memory players as more cars are becoming “smart” with the advent of electric vehicles (EVs) and autonomous driving systems.
With more vehicles being equipped with advanced automotive electronics equipment such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and infotainment systems, the importance of compatibility and stability between hardware and software components has increased.
Both Samsung and SK are expected to show the lead they have taken in this lucrative sector at this year’s event.Samsung recently began mass-producing universal flash storage (UFS) 3.1 memory chips for automotive infotainment.
Kim Jae-joon, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics, told investors during a conference call on July 27, that Samsung is strengthening its competitiveness to respond to the rapidly growing automotive memory semiconductor market.
“With the advent of EV and autonomous vehicles, the demand for automotive memory is strong.
We expect the automotive memory market to grow at an average annual rate of mid-30% over the next five years in terms of volume,” he said.”In fact, automotive demand is expected to grow rapidly and become a larger business opportunity than the application side of PCs by the early 2030s, so we continue to strengthen the competitiveness of related businesses.”
SK hynix is also expected to showcase technologies related to automotive products.
In June, the company said it became the first Korean chip company to achieve Capability Level 2 certification for Automotive SPICE, a software development standard for the European automotive industry.
Noting these changing trends, the organizer of the event also plans to hold many sessions to shed light more on flash memory technologies for cars.
“Regulators want the industry to move to clean air vehicles as rapidly as possible while manufacturers are developing new technologies to enhance vehicle safety and communications,” Tom Coughlin, Flash Memory Summit program chairman, said.”It all requires major advances in data capture, management, storage and continuous communications with other vehicles, roads and locations.Which places added pressure on flash memory devices to perform accurately 100 percent of the time.”
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