A History of innovation

On a hot summer day in August 2001, a group of Samsung executives gathered at the Zakuro restaurant in Tokyo. Like many pivotal moments, it seemed unremarkable at the time, but the decisions made that day set a course that would transform the history of memory technology.

The discussions at the now renowned “Zakuro Meeting” didn’t even feel particularly momentous. The executives were there to decide whether Samsung should accept a joint-development proposal from a leading flash-memory company, or continue to cultivate its own technology.

Source: Samsung

After much deliberation, Samsung chose to go its own way, and never looked back. A year later, the company officially gained top spot in the world’s flash-memory market. Today, after 17 years of building a global reputation for groundbreaking innovation and quality, Samsung is still No. 1.

“As the world moves into the Fourth Industrial Revolution era and technologies like 5G and Big Data change the way we work and live, flash memory will become more important than ever,” says Samsung.

The path has been far from straightforward, however. When the Zakuro Meeting took place, Samsung had been predicting for a while that flash memory would emerge as a dominant technology, but the market for it was limited. The company had developed the first 1Gb NAND flash in 1999, but Samsung was already an established leader in the DRAM sector, and NAND flash memory was expensive. There were also whispers in the industry at the time that demand for NAND was going to shrink by 35 percent.

Source: Samsung

Meanwhile, the runaway success of products like the Game Boy and Tamagotchi made it more profitable to focus on the Mask ROM (MROM) technology that drove these devices. Samsung had succeeded in developing its own MROM as far back as 1989 but eventually the company hit a wall. MROM lacked a broad variety of applications and demand was confined to relatively narrow markets.

The decision by Samsung executives to commit to their belief in the coming dawn of the flash-memory era was therefore fraught with risk.

The first obstacle was to find a global application for the technology, and the solution lay in exploding demand for PCs, which were selling more than 100 million units a year. With the Internet still nascent in 2001, moving data from one PC to another was cumbersome. Portable flash memory provided a fast and simple solution, and so Samsung gave birth to now-ubiquitous pinky-sized USB memory stick.

Mass production of 1Gb NAND flash enabled the company to establish leadership¹ of this emerging market, and its position has been cemented ever since by the relentless pursuit of improvement and innovation. The commercial introduction of 1Gb NAND flash was followed quickly by 2Gb in 2002, accelerating rapidly to 64Gb by 2007.

At the same time, Samsung steadily strengthened its pre-eminence in fine processing, progressing from 90-nanometer (nm) designs in 2002 to 40nm in 2006 and then to 30nm in 2007, an achievement widely seen as the opening of a new technological frontier.

Source: Samsung

“At each stage of the journey, we had to demonstrate both commercial and technical innovation,” says Samsung. “In 2005, for example, when the industry was facing a global supply glut of NAND flash, Samsung responded by trying to generate new markets. We were able to re-establish ourselves as an industry leader thanks to our huge success in the MP3 player market.”

In the same period during the mid-2000s, Samsung became the first company to commercialize solid state drives (SSDs), creating a massive market that’s forecast to outstrip hard disk drive sales by 2021².

In 2006, Samsung commercialized the first 40nm 32Gb NAND flash featuring an innovative charge trap flash (CTF) architecture that overcame the limitations of the ‘floating gate’ architectures common at the time.

As the company progressed to 10nm-class 128Gb flash, it exposed technical limitations with CTF. That led to another breakthrough moment, when Samsung unveiled in August 2013 the world’s first commercially available 3D vertical NAND (3D V-NAND).

Source: Samsung

The V-NAND revolution was made possible by proprietary Samsung innovations that led to three major improvements: faster speeds, lower power consumption and greater durability. The result was a secure, high-capacity flash technology that overcomes chip density limitations and marked yet another Samsung-led breakthrough in memory technology.

Samsung has retained its No. 1 position in the flash memory market through continuous improvement, and to this day the company is still working to advance technology and deliver innovative products to market.

The last 17 years have seen remarkable progress. What do the next 17 years have in store?

¹Source: 2019 Q2 IHS Markit data: NAND suppliers' revenue market share.

²https://bit.ly/3jKIuNi