TrendForce's latest investigations reveal that the global NAND Flash market has been facing a demand headwind since 2H22. In response, the supply chain has been scrambling to clear out inventory, driving down NAND Flash contract prices by 20-25%. Enterprise SSD took the brunt of the fall with prices plummeting 23-28%. Despite manufacturers lowering prices in an attempt to drive up demand, clients are hesitant to purchase more components for fear of overstock. As a result, NAND Flash bit shipments rose by a mere 5.3% as ASP fell 22.8%. Global NAND Flash revenue was reported to be US$10.29 billion in 4Q22—down 25% QoQ.

TrendForce reports that Kioxia and Micron saw both a reduction in production and price in 4Q22. Kioxia's revenue plunged 30.5% due to weak demand from PC and smartphone clients and data centers readjusting their inventory. Micron generated a quarterly revenue of US$1.1 billion—a staggering 34.7% QoQ drop—that has led them to drastically decrease their capacity utilization rate for fabs. Luckily, Micron was able to ship their 232-layer client SSDs in 4Q22 as scheduled, and with the 176-layer QLC enterprise SSD hot on its heels, Micron's bit shipments are predicted to steadily improve in 2023 with their revenue climbing gradually quarter by quarter.

Google's internal team Project Zero, dedicated to the discovery and patching of zero-day vulnerabilities in mobile hardware, software, web browsers and open source libraries disclosed a series of vulnerabilities in Samsung's Exynos chipsets featured across a wide range of mobile devices. Four of these critical vulnerabilities allow for internet-to-baseband remote code execution, and testing conducted by Project Zero confirmed that an attacker can compromise a phone at the baseband level with only the victim's phone number. They believe that with sufficient skill an attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities completely silently and remotely. The fourteen other vulnerabilities are related but considered to not be as critical as they require a more extensive setup including a malicious mobile network operator or local access to the targeted device.

Due to the severity of the main four critical vulnerabilities Project Zero has delayed full disclosure on how the exploit works stating:

Due to a very rare combination of level of access these vulnerabilities provide and the speed with which we believe a reliable operational exploit could be crafted, we have decided to make a policy exception to delay disclosure for the four vulnerabilities that allow for Internet-to-baseband remote code execution.

Kernel information for a chipset code-named 'Quadra' has been leaked by Home IT. It appears that this SoC is under development at Samsung Electronics, and could be featured in the company's next generation flagship smartphone range. The recently released Galaxy S23 smartphone series is powered by Qualcomm's cutting-edge Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which ended up being a fine choice for the end user. This was not an ideal partnership for the semiconductor giant, considering its constant push to promote internally developed hardware.

Industry experts have praised Samsung for not integrating an Exynos processor into this generation of devices, including regional model variations, but that has not stopped the company's persistent development cycle of proprietary mobile CPUs. Rumors point to a collaboration with Google, and the Exynos 2300 SoC looks to form the basis of the latter's next generation Tensor G3 chipset. The leak reveals that the standard 2300 has been designed as a 1+4+4 core configuration, comprised of four performance cores, four efficiency cores, and one super core.

Samsung Electronics has announced ambitious long term plans to expand its operation in South Korea. The company is set to invest around $230 billion in new fabrication facilities, with five locations marked for development in Yongin, a city located within the Seoul Capital Area. The five new factories with mixed foundry and memory manufacturing purposes, will form part of the South Korean government's intentions to assemble a mega semiconductor hub in the region.

South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) on Wednesday revealed its intent to invest $422 billion by 2026 to boost production of six core technologies: semiconductors, electric vehicle batteries, autonomous vehicles, robots and displays. The government provided a breakdown of the total budget, and $260 billion has been allocated for the country's chip space to develop system semiconductors into the year 2026.

In a Samsung Electronics business report released on March 12, it was revealed that the giant electronics manufacturer will begin mass production of new chips through a 4 nm 2.3-generation process. The newly established manufacturing process is set to start by the end of H1 2023, which means that mid-June would be the expected commencement date. Samsung Semiconductor has managed to produce a satisfactory yield of wafers with the new generation chipsets.

Samsung Electronics has experienced significant problems with the production of previous generation 4 nm chips, and industry insiders have been surprised by the sudden announcement of the third generation version, given rumors pointing to the Hwaseong factory struggling to reach yields at the 60% mark. Qualcomm famously dropped Samsung in favor of TSMC as a source of 4 nm chipsets in 2022, due to disappointing yield figures.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the global foundry market, electronics brands began adjusting their inventories in 2Q22, but foundries were unable to rapidly adapt to this development because they reside in the more upper portion of the supply chain. Moreover, revising procurement quantities of long-term foundry contracts takes time as well. Hence, only some tier-2 and -3 foundries were able to immediately respond to the changes in their clients' demand. Also, among them, 8-inch wafer foundries made a more pronounced reduction in their capacity utilization rates. As for the remaining foundries, the downward corrections that they made to their capacity utilization rates did not become noticeable until 4Q22. Hence, in 4Q22, the quarterly total revenue of the global top 10 foundries registered a QoQ decline for the first time after 13 consecutive quarters of positive growth. The quarterly total revenue of the top 10 foundries came to US$33,530 million, reflecting a drop of 4.7% from 3Q22. Moving into 1Q23, TrendForce projects that the quarterly total revenue of the top 10 will show an even steeper drop on account of seasonality and the uncertain macroeconomic situation.

Apex Storage, a new company in the storage world, has announced that its X21 add-in-card (AIC) has room for 21 (you read that right) PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs. The card supports up to 168 TBs with 8 TB M.2 NVMe SSDs and 336 TBs of storage with future 16 TB M.2 SSDs drives and can withstand speeds of up to 30.5 GB/s. Packed inside a single-slot, full-length, full-height AIC, the X21 card is built for a snug fit inside workstations and applications such as machine learning and hyper-converged infrastructure that enterprises need to develop inside servers and workstations across the site.

The X21 AIC has 100 PCIe lanes on the board, which indicates the presence of a PCIe switch, likely placed under the heatsink. To power all the storage, the PCIe slot itself needs to be more, and the card also has two 6-pin PCIe power connectors that provide 225 Watts of power in total. Interestingly, the heatsink is passively cooled, but Apex Storage suggests that there should be an active airflow with a minimum of 400 LFM to ensure the regular operation of the card. In the example application, the company laid out X21 with Samsung's 990 Pro SSDs; however, the card also supports Intel Optane drives. Read and Write IOPS are higher than 10 million. Additionally, the average read and write access latencies are 79 ms and 52 ms. Apex Storage didn't reveal the pricing and availability of the card; however, expect it to come with a premium.

Samsung Electronics reportedly invested a record 53.11 trillion KRW (USD $40.2 billion) in expanding its semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, until March 2023, with investments throughout 2022 totaling $37 billion (47.87 trillion KRW). Business Korea reports that much of the investment was made toward increasing memory products manufacturing capacity, despite the ongoing slump in the PC and ICT industries from a possible economic recession. Samsung anticipates a continued growth in DRAM, possibly as the data-center and consumer-electronics industries transition to faster memory types. In particular, Samsung is undertaking a doubling in foundry capacity in its Pyeongtaek foundry.

Business Korea got the scoop on Samsung hiring an ex TSMC executive by the name of Lin Jun-Cheng, who was with TSMC for almost 19 years. His role at Samsung will be as VP of Samsung's advanced packaging business, something he should be more than familiar with, as during his time at TSMC, he was part of no less than 450 patents involving chip packaging. Lin has also worked for Micron and more recently for a company called Skytech, that specialises in advanced IC packaging equipment.

Samsung has relied on third parties when it comes to more advanced chip packaging and has been behind Intel and TSMC in this area. The Business Korea article mentions that Samsung has been spending a lot of resources over the past year to build its own advanced packaging business, including hiring industry experts. Samsung has hired ex Apple, Intel and Qualcomm staff to join or head various teams related to its foundry division, not only for packaging, but also experts in various lithography processes, such as EUV. Samsung is clearly taking its foundry business seriously, even though they have had their fair share of issues with various customers over the past few years.

Smartphone brands hoped that the promotional activities related to the year-end holiday season or initiated by e-commerce companies would lead to a significant reduction in channel inventory near the end of 2022. However, the recent downturn of the global economy continued to impact consumer confidence in 4Q22, so smartphone sales were lower than expected and thereby dragged down the speed of inventory consumption. Moreover, the labor shortage problem at Foxconn's electronics assembly base in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou affected Apple's efforts to raise iPhone production in 4Q22. According to TrendForce's latest research, quarterly global smartphone production totaled around 301 million for 4Q22, reflecting a QoQ growth of 4% and a YoY decline of 15.5%.

Earlier in 1H22, China's enforcement of its zero-COVID policy and the Russia-Ukraine military conflict caused the demand for consumer electronics to plunge. Later in 2H22, the global economy experienced a decline that was worse than expected as factors such as high inflation, food shortages, and rising energy prices came into play. As a result, consumer demand was further weakened. Besides these negative factors, the high level of channel inventory was also a major reason as to why smartphone brands suffered a drop in annual device production. Based on TrendForce's calculation, annual global smartphone production fell by 10.6% YoY to 1.192 billion units for 2022. This YoY decline was larger than one recorded for the year when the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged.

With Samsung Electronics announcing that the next-generation GDDR7 memory standard is in development, and Cadence, a vital IP provider for DRAM PHY, EDA software, and validation tools announcing its latest validation solution, the decks are clear for the new memory standard to debut with the next-generation of GPUs. GDDR7 would succeed GDDR6, which had debuted in 2018, and has been around for nearly 5 years now. GDDR6 launched with speeds of 14 Gbps, and its derivatives are now in production with speeds as high as 24 Gbps. It provided a generational doubling in speeds from the preceding GDDR5.

The new GDDR7 promises the same, with its starting speeds said to be as high as 36 Gbps, going beyond the 50 Gbps mark in its lifecycle. A MyDrivers report says that NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 50-series, probably slated for a late-2024 debut, as well as AMD's competing RDNA4 graphics architecture, could introduce GDDR7 at its starting speeds of 36 Gbps. A GPU with a 256-bit wide GDDR7 interface would enjoy 1.15 TB/s of bandwidth, and one with 384-bit would have a cool 1.7 TB/s to play with. We still don't know what is the codename of NVIDIA's next graphics architecture, it could be any of the ones NVIDIA hasn't used from the image below.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

Looking back at 2H22, as server OEMs slowed down the momentum of their product shipments, Chinese server buyers also held a conservative outlook on future demand and focused on inventory reduction. Thus, the flow of orders for enterprise SSDs remained sluggish. However, NAND Flash suppliers had to step up shipments of enterprise SSDs during 2H22 because the demand for storage components equipped in notebook (laptop) computers and smartphones had undergone very large downward corrections. Compared with other categories of NAND Flash products, enterprise SSDs represented the only significant source of bit consumption. Ultimately, due to the imbalance between supply and demand, the QoQ decline in prices of enterprise SSDs widened to 25% for 4Q22. This price plunge, in turn, caused the quarterly total revenue from enterprise SSDs to drop by 27.4% QoQ to around US$3.79 billion. TrendForce projects that the NAND Flash industry will again post a QoQ decline in the revenue from this product category for 1Q23.

Welcome to the battle of the Korean OLED display makers, where LG Display is now claiming that Samsung's new-ish QD OLED displays are far more susceptible to screen burn, compared to its own WOLED displays. In a way, this is LG getting back at Samsung, as the latter has criticised LG for quite some time, over screen burn on its OLED displays, despite the fact that Samsung hasn't had any of its own OLED products until last year. LG Display is basing much of its claims on testing by Rtings, which isn't yet publicly available, but the company also has a technical explanation behind it all.

Both LG's and Samsung's OLED panels are based around RGB subpixels, just like most LCD panels, with the difference being that OLED panels don't have a backlight, as the pixels themselves are supposed to emit the light. However, RGB subpixels on larger screens tend to lack in brightness and this is why LG added white subpixels to its WOLED panels, which was also a source of criticism from Samsung. However, Samsung's QD OLED displays use a blue OLED layer behind a Quantum Dot layer, which is meant to produce a brighter image than LG's WOLED panels. LG now claims that because Samsung went down the path of using pure RGB subpixels, each subpixel is subjected to a lot more stress on static images than its own WOLED design, which in turn causes screen burn. LG Display did apparently not go into much more details than that at the online press conference the company had called last week, so we'll have to wait and see what Rtings reveals in its next update on its long term testing, which is supposed to take place sometime this month.

Update Mar 3rd 15:08 UTC: Rtings reached out to us and explained that they didn't provide any data to LG Display. Instead, LG Display based its assumptions on photos posted by Rtings on its website. Rtings provided the following statement:

We didn't send any information to LG Display. We published our two-month data and pictures in two waves on February 6th and 16th. It appears LG took these images from our reviews when they were released publicly.

Further to that point, LG Display also did not reach out to us prior to their press call where they referenced our test and images.

According to TrendForce's research, global DRAM revenue fell by 32.5% QoQ to US$12, 281 million for 4Q22. The QoQ decline for 4Q22 is larger than the QoQ decline of 28.8% for 3Q22 and comes close to the QoQ decline of 36% for the final quarter of 2008, when the global economy was in the midst of a major financial crisis. The main cause of the steep revenue drop in 4Q22 was the plummeting overall ASP. DRAM suppliers experienced a rapid accumulation of inventory in 3Q22 due to a freeze in buyers' demand. Subsequently, suppliers were much more energetic in price negotiations for 4Q22 contracts as they were struggling for market share. Among the major categories of DRAM products, server DRAM suffered the sharpest price drop in 4Q22. Contract prices of DDR4 and DDR5 server DRAM products registered QoQ drops of 23~28% and 30~35% respectively.

For more than a decade, Intel and its partners have been on a mission to virtualize the world's networks, from the core to the RAN (radio access network) and out to the edge, moving them from fixed-function hardware onto programmable, software-defined platforms, making networks more agile while driving down their complexity and cost.

Now operators are looking to cross the next chasm in delivering cloud-native functionality for automating, managing and responding to an increasingly diverse mix of data and services, providing organizations with the intelligence needed at the edge of their operations. Today, Intel announced a range of products and solutions driving this transition and broad industry support from leading operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs).

Samsung Electronics announced the Galaxy Book3 Ultra is available for pre-order beginning today, February 14, with global availability starting February 22. Samsung's new premium PC offers an unmatched Samsung Galaxy ecosystem experience and high-performance computing, all in a thin, light and sleek design. The Galaxy Book3 Pro and Book3 Pro 360, has been available for global pre-orders on February 1. The latest Galaxy Book Pro series has experienced record-breaking interest from consumers, generating more than doubling pre-orders of last year's Galaxy Book2 Pro series.

"At Samsung, Ultra means big, bold and the best, regardless of category. That's why we're excited to bring the Ultra heritage to our PC lineup, delivering the seamless multi-device connectivity and ultra-high performance that users demand," said TM Roh, President and Head of Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics. "The Galaxy Book3 Ultra delivers on the market expectation for an ultra-high performance laptop, particularly for consumers interested in gaming and content creation who require the powerful performance."

Based on news out of Korea, Samsung is said to be launching a 49-inch QD-OLED based monitor at some point later this quarter, although sadly, nothing was mentioned about what kind of resolution the display would sport. At the same time, Samsung is also said to be launching a 77-inch TV model, as the Elec suggests the two will be made from the same Gen 8.5 substrate.

This is because Samsung Display can cut two 77-inch and two 49-inch QD-OLED display panels from each Gen 8.5 substrate. Initially Samsung had apparently requested a 48-inch monitor, but based on the Elec's sources, Samsung Display declined, as it didn't make economical sense to waste the extra panel substrate. With a bit of luck, the new 49-inch display panel will feature a 4K resolution, as all of Samsung's QD-OLED TVs to date, are 4K. The only exception is Samsung's 34-inch QD-OLED monitor panel, which is 3440x1440, as we know. The monitor is said to be sold as Samsung OLED, suggesting that Samsung might dual source panels from LG Display as well.

Samsung Electronics today unveiled the Galaxy S23 Ultra, Galaxy S23+ and Galaxy S23, marking a new era of Samsung Galaxy's ultimate premium phone experience. Samsung Galaxy's epic camera gives users more freedom to explore their creativity, like capturing truly cinematic Nightography videos with transformative AI. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform for Galaxy unleashes premium experiences, including groundbreaking AI, future-ready mobile gaming feature and powerfully sustained game play with the world's fastest mobile graphics. On the Galaxy S23 Ultra, an embedded S Pen that many long-time Samsung Galaxy users know and love offers more possibilities for productivity, notetaking, hobbies and more. All the Galaxy S23 series' new standard-setting innovations are housed within a striking design that advances the company's sustainability commitment with more components made using recycled materials than any other Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

"The value of impactful technology is measured, not just by what it enables for people today, but also how it contributes to a better future," said TM Roh, President and Head of Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics. "The entire Galaxy S23 series is the new standard-bearer of trustworthy premium smartphone experiences. We're on a mission to redefine peak performance by bringing together powerful, lasting innovations and sustainability."

Samsung Electronics today unveiled the Galaxy Book3 series, its latest flagship PC lineup featuring the Galaxy Book3 Ultra, Book3 Pro 360 and Book3 Pro. The Galaxy Book3 Ultra—Samsung's new premium PC—features ultra-high-performance computing, the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 features a 2-in-1 convertible form factor with S Pen functionality, and the Galaxy Book3 Pro features thin and light, mobility-first clamshell design. The Galaxy Book3 series is designed for those who need seamless multi-device connectivity and premium hardware to supercharge their productivity and creativity.

"Today, we're seeing an increasing number of people using multiple devices to perform efficiently. These new workflows are made possible thanks to our open and extensive Galaxy ecosystem," said TM Roh, President and Head of Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics. "The latest Galaxy Book3 series further enriches our connected offerings. It is tailor-made for Galaxy enthusiasts looking for ultra-high computing performance and seamless connected Galaxy experiences to maximize their productivity and creativity."

Samsung Electronics today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year 2022. The Company posted KRW 70.46 trillion in consolidated revenue and KRW 4.31 trillion in operating profit in the quarter ended December 31, 2022. For the full year, it reported 302.23 trillion in annual revenue, a record high and KRW 43.38 trillion in operating profit.

The business environment deteriorated significantly in the fourth quarter due to weak demand amid a global economic slowdown. Earnings at the Memory Business decreased sharply as prices fell and customers continued to adjust inventory. The System LSI Business also saw a decline in earnings as sales of key products were weighed down by inventory adjustments in the industry. The Foundry Business posted a new record for quarterly revenue while profit increased year-on-year on the back of advanced node capacity expansion as well as customer base and application area diversification.

At CES, LG announced its new Gram Style notebooks with OLED displays and news out of Korea now suggests that the 14 and 16-inch notebooks will sport OLED displays from LG's main competitor, Samsung. This might not be entirely surprising, as there's a limited number of laptop sized OLED panel manufacturers and it seems like LG would rather go with a local, Korean option, rather than using a Japanese or Chinese panel in its upcoming notebooks.

The report by the Elec suggests that the LG Gram Style notebooks will use Samsung's rigid OLED panels based on a standard glass substrate. This is also the type of panel that most other notebook manufacturers are using today, as it's the most cost effective type of OLED panels, regardless of manufacturer. LG Display doesn't currently manufacture this type of OLED panels, even though it apparently could do so, using its flexible OLED production lines, albeit at a higher cost. The irony in the situation is still hard to miss though, as the two companies are fierce competitors in many of their core businesses.

Samsung 990 PRO is the company's flagship client SSD, which is among the fastest Gen 4 NVMe SSDs you can buy. It also commands a very high price premium, with the 1 TB variant priced at $170, and the 2 TB variant at $290. When you're buying in this segment, you expect the highest endurance figures for your SSD. Client SSD endurance figures are already on the rise, as NAND flash technology evolves. Neowin noticed that their 990 PRO isn't meeting this vital expectation, and with a little digging, found that there are others with this problem, and they didn't just get a bad drive.

Apparently, the "drive health" reading in Samsung Magician—the utility software for Samsung SSDs—drops rather rapidly for the 990 PRO. After a clean software installation on a new drive, Neowin observed that their drive's health reading was already at 99% (something very unexpected for a new drive); and what's worse was that even with regular use of the drive in the following days, the drive health would drop by 1 percentage point every day. Drive health is interchangeable with endurance, as it indicates the number of program-erase (PE) cycles left on the NAND flash memory before regions of the drive's user-area become unwritable.

TrendForce's recent analysis of the foundry market reveals that demand continues to slide for all types of mature and advanced nodes. The major IC design houses have cut wafer input for 1Q23 and will likely scale back further for 2Q23. Currently, foundries are expected to maintain a lower-than-ideal level of capacity utilization rate in the first two quarters of this year. Some nodes could experience a steeper demand drop in 2Q23 as there are still no signs of a significant rebound in wafer orders. Looking ahead to the second half of this year, orders will likely pick up for some components that underwent an inventory correction at an earlier time. However, the state of the global economy will remain the largest variable that affect demand, and the recovery of individual foundries' capacity utilization rates will not occur as quickly as expected. Taking these factors into account, TrendForce currently forecasts that global foundry revenue will drop by around 4% YoY for 2023. The projected decline for 2023 is more severe when compared with the one that was recorded for 2019.

Samsung Electronics today announced production readiness of a high-performance PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, the PM9C1a. Integrated with a new controller based on Samsung's cutting-edge 5-nanometer (nm) process and the company's seventh-generation V-NAND technology, the PM9C1a will provide elevated computing and gaming performance in PCs and laptops.

"Our new PM9C1a SSD will deliver a robust combination of superior performance, greater power efficiency and increased security, which are the qualities that matter most to PC users," said Yong Ho Song, Executive Vice President of Memory Solution Product & Development at Samsung Electronics. "We are committed to creating storage that satisfies the diverse and changing market requirements as we continue to advance innovation in the PC SSD space."