Samsung NAND flashes its hot measurements: 64L 4G 3D 2C by EY

Samsung has started production of chips using its 3nm fabrication process, beating rival TSMC, which expects to begin making chips with its N3 node generation later this year.

The resultant chips are claimed to reduce power consumption by up to 45 percent and improve performance by up to 23 percent, with further gains promised in a second generation of the process.

Korea's electronics giant said it has started initial production with its 3nm process node, which introduces what the firm calls Multi-Bridge-Channel FET (MBCFET) technology. This is Samsung's version of the Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture, where the gate material wraps around the conducting channel.

Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission has fined Samsung Electronics AU$14 million ($9.6 million) for making for misleading water resistance claims about 3.1 million smartphones.

The Commission (ACCC) says that between 2016 and 2018 Samsung advertised its Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, A5, A7, S8, S8 Plus and Note 8 smartphones as capable of surviving short submersions in the sea or fresh water.

As it happens The Register attended the Australian launch of the Note 8 and watched on in wonder as it survived a brief dunking and bubbles appeared to emerge from within the device. Your correspondent recalls Samsung claiming that the waterproofing reflected the aim of designing a phone that could handle Australia's outdoors lifestyle.

The demand for consumer electronics has slowed down in the face of inflation – but that didn't stop nine of the world's 10 largest contract chip manufacturers from growing in the first three months of the year.

That's according to Taiwanese research firm TrendForce, which said on Monday the collective revenues for the top 10 chip foundries grew 8.2 percent to $31.96 billion in the first quarter of 2022 from the previous quarter. That's a hair slower than the 8.3 percent quarterly growth reported for the top-ten foundries in the fourth quarter of last year.

On a broader level, TrendForce said this revenue growth came from a mix of "robust wafer production" and foundries continuing to raise the prices of wafers as a result of high demand.

Samsung has once again been accused of cheating in benchmark tests to inflate the apparent abilities of its hardware.

The South Korean titan was said to have unfairly goosed Galaxy Note 3 phone benchmarks in 2013, and faced with similar allegations about the Galaxy S4 in 2018 settled that matter for $13.4 million.

This time Samsung has allegedly fudged the results for its televisions, specifically the S95B QD-OLED and QN95B Neo OLED LCD TVs. 

In yet another sign of how fortunes have changed in the semiconductor industry, Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC is expected to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue for the first time.

Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance.

The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC.

Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-yong is said to be courting Dutch chipmaker NXP on a visit to Europe to bolster the company's position in the automotive semiconductor market.

According to the Asian Tech Press, Jae-yong, who has been released on probation after serving time on corruption charges, is expected to visit several chipmakers and semiconductor manufacturing vendors including the Netherland's NXP and ASML, as well as Germany's Infineon. Press became aware of Jae-yong's plans after a Seoul Central District Court approved the vice chairman's travel plans.

NXP offers a wide array of microprocessors, power management, and wireless chips for automotive, communications, and industrial applications. However, the Asian Tech Press said Samsung's interest in the company, which is valued at approximately $56 billion, is primarily rooted in the company's automotive silicon.

Microsoft and Samsung have teamed to stream Xbox games on the Korean giant's smart televisions and monitors.

Samsung has offered streaming games since early 2022, taking advantage of its smart displays running the Linux-based Tizen OS. The "gaming hub" installed on those devices can already deliver games from Google Stadia and Nvidia GeForce Now.

Xbox is a rather larger brand, making this deal considerably more significant.

The global economy may be in a tenuous situation right now, but the semiconductor industry is likely to walk away from 2022 with a "healthy" boost in revenues, according to analysts at IDC. But beware oversupply, the analyst firm warns.

Semiconductor companies across the world are expected to grow collective revenues by 13.7 percent year-on-year to $661 billion, IDC said in research published Wednesday. Global semiconductor revenue last year was $582 billion.

"Overall, the semiconductor industry remains on track to deliver another healthy year of growth as the super cycle that began in 2020 continues this year," said Mario Morales, IDC group vice president of semiconductors.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Samsung Electronics boss Lee Jae-yong met on Monday in South Korea and “discussed how to cooperate between the two companies."

That quote comes from Samsung, which also let the world know the two leaders talked about next-generation memory chips, silicon for PCs and mobile devices, fabless chip design, the foundry business, and more.

It is unclear if the talks addressed a particular issue, or just represented the heads of the world’s top two chipmakers getting together for a chat while Gelsinger was in town.

Samsung and Red Hat have pledged to work together on developing software to get the best from emerging memory technologies.

The Korean giant points out that a bunch of storage and memory tech – NVMe SSDs, Compute Express Link, the combination of high-bandwidth memory and processing-in-memory, and data fabrics – all need enabling software if they are to work well with the kind of demanding applications they're promised to, well, enable.

The tech is likely to be used in different tiers, while sharing memory across devices is well and truly on the agenda as part of a renewed push for composable infrastructure.