Hyper Track | Samsung Electronics HBM3E passes NVIDIA's test

Author: Zhou Yuan/Wall Street View

Samsung Electronics finally breathed a sigh of relief.

On July 18th, Wall Street View exclusively learned from the supply chain that Samsung Electronics' HBM3E has passed NVIDIA's test.

This is a significant achievement for Samsung Electronics, which has established or reorganized semiconductor business teams into dedicated HBM groups four times since the beginning of this year, focusing on HBM technology to secure the qualification as a supplier for "NVIDIA AI Accelerator Card".

On July 16th, there were reports from the Taiwan supply chain that Samsung Electronics had requested its partners to allocate capacity related to HBM3E supply. Jibang Consulting also reported that Samsung Electronics' supply chain has started to move, with the possibility of shipping to NVIDIA starting in the third quarter of this year.

On July 31st, Samsung will hold a financial reporting meeting. The industry expects that Samsung is highly likely to announce the news of passing NVIDIA's HBM certification at that time.

In order to pass NVIDIA's test, Samsung Electronics also aims to regain its advantage in HBM technology and market share. From January to July 2024, Samsung has made four adjustments to its semiconductor business line to pave the way for this goal.

The most recent adjustment was on July 4th this year, when Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions (DS) department responsible for semiconductor business was reorganized, establishing a new HBM research and development group.

Son Young-Soo, Vice President of Samsung Electronics and a high-performance DRAM design expert, was appointed as the head of the research and development group, leading the team to focus on developing HBM3, HBM3E, and the next-generation HBM4 technology. At the same time, Samsung Electronics also reorganized the Advanced Packaging (AVP) team and the Equipment Technology Laboratory to enhance overall technological competitiveness.

This is another large-scale organizational restructuring following Young Hyun Jun replacing Kyung Kye-hyun as the head of the DS department in May.

Samsung Electronics' DS department, namely the Device Solutions department, is mainly responsible for semiconductor-related businesses such as storage, systems, and wafer foundry.

The storage business includes the development, manufacturing, and strategic marketing of DRAM memory and NAND flash memory; the System LSI business involves system-level chip design, manufacturing, and sales; and the wafer foundry business manufactures semiconductor chips for other companies. This department plays a key role in Samsung Electronics' semiconductor business, dedicated to driving technological innovation and business development.

Jun Young-hyun first joined Samsung Electronics' memory chip business team in 2000. From 2014 to 2017, Jun Young-hyun served as the head of DRAM and memory chip development business. Subsequently, Jun Young-hyun transferred to Samsung's battery manufacturer, Samsung SDI, as the CEO, responsible for the battery business.

The HBM group led by Son Young-Soo is called the "HBM Development Team," replacing two specialized HBM technology teams including the "HBM Capacity and Quality Improvement Team," concentrating technical expertise and internal resources to tackle the technical development of HBM3E and HBM4, aiming to catch up with the leader SK Hynix in the HBM business sector It seems that Sun Yongzhu's work is very effective. In just two weeks (14 days) after the establishment of the "HBM Development Team" under his leadership, Samsung Electronics' HBM3E passed NVIDIA's technical tests.

It is worth mentioning that Samsung Electronics uses its own 4nm process technology to manufacture logic chips in the HBM4 (6th generation) products. Currently, Samsung Electronics' 4nm process technology has a yield rate of over 70%.

In HBM, the logic chip, known as Logic Die, is the basic bare die for SK Hynix, while Micron Technology refers to it as the Interface Die.

The above image shows the microphysical structure of Micron Technology's HBM3E.

The DRAM Die provides memory capacity for HBM; the Interface Die (Logic Die) is the control unit of the DRAM stack and is responsible for communicating with the processor's memory interface through the interconnect layer. Therefore, the Logic Die is an important component of HBM memory.

As the logic chip of HBM4 needs to support more signal pins, larger data bandwidth, and carry some customized functions for customers, memory manufacturers have started to cooperate with logic wafer factories to produce the logic chip of HBM4 using logic semiconductor processes.

There have been reports that SK Hynix's HBM4 logic chip, which was previously rumored to use TSMC's 7nm process technology, will now be replaced by TSMC's 5nm process technology.

According to Micron Technology's financial report, producing a given quantity of HBM3E at the same technology node consumes approximately three times the wafer supply of DDR5. Therefore, Samsung Electronics plans to reallocate about 30% of the DDR5 capacity to specialize in producing HBM. However, this news has not been officially confirmed by Samsung Electronics.

Nevertheless, the industry still believes in the reliability of this news.

Given that Samsung Electronics is the global leader in DRAM with a market share of up to 45%, reallocating 30% of its DRAM capacity to HBM would reduce the global DRAM supply by about 13%, creating an even larger DRAM supply gap than HBM, leading to further price increases