Product of the 4th generation V-NAND memory chip of Samsung Electronics. Photo: Yonhap/VNA Specifically, Samsung – the world’s largest memory chip manufacturer and Hyundai – South Korea’s leading automobile manufacturing group have signed a cooperation agreement with the Institute of Automotive Technology and the Institute of Electronic Technology under the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Korea Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) to strengthen cooperation in the automotive chip manufacturing industry. Details of the contract between Samsung and Hyundai were not disclosed. However, an unnamed government official said: “We do not rule out the possibility that Hyundai will receive automotive chips from Samsung.” South Korea boasts a world leader in memory chip production, but is relatively weak in the logic chip business. According to data from the Korea International Trade Association, the country accounts for only 2.3% of the automotive chip manufacturing market. Leading in this field are the US (31.4%), Japan (22.4%), and Germany (17.7%) respectively. Major Korean chipmakers such as Samsung and SK hynix Inc. focuses on manufacturing high-performance memory semiconductors because automotive chips are seen as less profitable, while requiring complex testing processes and strict quality requirements. Korean automakers are being hit hard by a global shortage of automotive chips, especially electronic control chips in cars, leading to production halts. output many times. The move comes as the Korean government aims to establish an automotive chip supply chain to solve the global shortage of semiconductors. The government plans to roll out tax incentives and subsidies worth a total of 510 trillion won ($453 billion) to semiconductor companies between now and 2030. The Korean government hopes that the agreement between Samsung and Hyundai can strengthen the country’s autonomy in the field of automotive chip production and enhance Korea’s competitiveness in the production of world cars. next generation in the future. While chipmakers will be at the forefront of research and development of core semiconductor technology, auto manufacturers will focus on providing platforms for testing new automotive chips and components. related department.

A solar power plant in Maryland, USA. (Photo: AFP / VNA) A unit of the company Samsung C&T is considering investing $ 673 million in the construction of solar power plants in Texas (USA), to start commercial production in December 2023. The solar facilities above will be located in Milam County, Texas, less than two hours ‘drive from Samsung Electronics’ chip factory in Austin. Austin is where Samsung is considering building a new $ 17 billion chip factory. With a capacity of about 700 MW, solar power plants will begin construction in June 2022. A Samsung C&T official said the company is doing the approval procedures with the authorities. The attractiveness of solar and wind power is increasing rapidly as nations around the world switch from fossil fuels to cleaner renewable sources to prevent global warming. The administration of US President Joe Biden aims to generate electricity from non-carbon sources such as nuclear and renewable energy by 2035. Recently, South Korean President Moon Jae-in also pledged to end all new funding for overseas coal projects and will soon come up with a more ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions. . In October, Samsung C&T Corp announced its decision to suspend any new projects or investments related to coal. While chip makers like Samsung Electronics, Intel and TSMC are also committed to increasing the use of renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions.

Semiconductor chips are an important component of modern electronics that can be found in thousands of products used every day, including cars, computers, smartphones and medical devices … These chips are the brains of all electronic devices, performing functions ranging from repetitive tasks like memory and microprocessors, to complex tasks like intelligence. artificial and high-end graphics. Semiconductor chips, which have a relatively low price, have suddenly become a scarce commodity. Jordan Wu, co-founder and CEO of Himax Technologies Co., told Bloomberg: “I’ve never seen anything like this in the past 20 years, since the company was founded. Every industry lacks chips ”. President Joe Biden with the chip model in a press conference at the White House, before signing an executive order to prevent a shortage of semiconductor supplies with the US economy, on 24/2. Photo: REUTERS The global chip crisis is believed to have been rooted in a miscalculation when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out last year. With the epidemic spreading from China to the globe, many companies predict that consumers will reduce the time spent using technology equipment. However, when “stuck” in the home, consumers begin to buy more technology devices: Add laptops so their children can learn from afar; buy a handheld game machine, an oil-free fryer, a blender … to make life less boring. There has been a comparison to call the Covid-19 epidemic “a prolonged Black Friday event”.
Meanwhile, car manufacturers were also affected by the pandemic. They were forced to shut down factories during a period of social isolation, when demand declined because customers were unable to visit stores. They ask suppliers to stop shipping components, including chips, which are increasingly essential to cars. By the end of last year, consumers started going out but restricted the use of public transport. Automakers reopened and turned to chipmakers like TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (South Korea), and of course had to wait in line. Chip makers have been unable to accommodate soaring demand for their very loyal customers.
The shortages are aggravated this year, due to a series of disruptions. For example, the Japanese Renesas Electronics chip factory caught fire, the drought in the “country of the chip” Taiwan (China), and the cold spell in Texas (USA) caused the factories of Samsung, NXP Semiconductors and Infineon there to temporarily stopped working. “Everything right now is no different from hell,” said Frank McKay, CPO of Jabil – a company that buys billions of dollars of chips each year to assemble products for customers including Apple, Amazon, Cisco Systems and Tesla – to speak. Every day, Frank said, his company faced a shortage of about 100 components and had to negotiate as hard as possible to get it.
The difficulty of manufacturers
Limited supply of semiconductor chips is not a new issue, but what has happened is often related to specific chips. Consumers around the globe now compete fiercely for a cheaper chip made in old factories, when it is a fact that these factories are difficult to upgrade.
For example, the supply of integrated microchips for automotive systems is particularly in short supply as they are typically manufactured on 8-inch wide silicon (wafer) discs, instead of more high-end 12-inch panels. But no company builds more production lines because they are not profitable. Sumco Corp – one of the leading wafer manufacturers, has reported production capacity of an 8-inch equipment line to be around 5,000 panels a month by 2020 – less than in 2017. The purchase of new equipment and Starting with lower productivity means producers’ costs go up.
Meanwhile, the US, Japan and Germany – the world’s largest car makers – are making moves to put pressure on major chipmakers in Asia, forcing them to prioritize chip lines. In-car use up above the needs of other customers, which include smartphone and computer makers. The governments of these three countries fear that the car industry will slow down, or even cut production due to lack of chips, threatening domestic jobs and economic recovery after the pandemic. However, according to insiders, the political pressure to force chipmakers to prioritize demand from carmakers only exacerbates the realities of the supply chain.
“We have to renegotiate with a number of customers and at the same time have to respond to requests from the government to prioritize the production of chips used in the car manufacturing industry, which plays an important role. “This is in contrast to before, when chip manufacturing on a first come first served basis”, said Mark Liu – Chairman of TSMC.
Just a bubble?
The technology war between the US and China, which took place before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, is also believed to have had negative effects on the supply chain. As Washington imposed restrictions on China’s Huawei Group’s access to key US technologies, it increased stockpiling of components as much as possible. Many other Chinese companies, which fear they will fall into the same situation, do the same way Huawei has. The result has spiked demand for chips and components.
On April 12, Huawei directly blamed the United States for indirectly causing a global crisis, arguing that Washington’s sanctions on Chinese technology companies have caused love. “panic procurement” of components and chips, causing supply chain disruptions. “Apparently unreasonable US sanctions against Huawei and other Chinese companies have created a component shortage across the industry, and this could completely cause a crisis. global ”- said Eric Xu – Huawei’s rotating chairman.
However, companies are still uncertain about the current “thirst” for chips. For them, great demand comes from a series of hedge orders, stockpiling efforts or even the determination to take market share from competitors, thereby creating the “semiconductor chip bubble” on market. TSMC President Liu acknowledged that most customers want to order more than twice as much as they need to minimize the risk of supply chain disruptions caused by geopolitical tensions.
“The current strong demand won’t last forever, because buyers won’t buy five phones or five cars at a time. I worry that there will be adjustments when one of the big players in the industry takes action, and orders will start to decline, ”a leader in the chip supply chain told Nikkei Asia. “I’ve never seen anything like this in the last 20 years since the company was founded. Every industry lacks chips.” – Co-Founder and CEO of Himax Technologies J ordan Wu

In addition to a number of corporations such as Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics of South Korea and Huawei of China, most recently, Apple (the US technology corporation) also announced to recruit engineers to participate in research and development. to develop wireless technology next generation 5G. According to current research directions, the theoretical speed of 6G network will be one Tb / s, about 100 times higher than the theoretical speed of the 5G network (10 Gb / s). The new technology will also have broad coverage and be more energy efficient than the previous generation. Most importantly, 6G hopes to solve the limitations of current 5G networks. Specifically, even though it is considered as an Internet of Things (IoT) network, 5G still has a long way to go to achieve universal universality due to its limited ability to transmit signals at a height of many thousand meters. ground or deep below the ground or seabed. Meanwhile, 6G is research-oriented to meet both intelligent connectivity, deep connection, heterogeneous connection and everywhere. On the other hand, although 5G network has helped people make good use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to optimize, distribute resources and process data, the forecast 6G network can do better by making AI becomes intelligent with the processing speed close to the human brain. 6G will integrate the new physical, digital, and services worlds to deliver stricter network performance metrics (KPIs) than 5G. However, the development of 6G networks is still just beginning and the end result will depend on speed of deployment and consensus on the technologies to deliver the ultimate standard. Experts say that the next 10 years will be a period for research and 6G will start to be commercialized from 2030. In the process of deploying previous generations of mobile networks such as 2G, 3G or 4G, Vietnam often lags behind the world. As for 5G networks, we are now starting to perform tests with the expectation of entering the first groups of countries to deploy the technology. But according to experts, in fact, Vietnam is still quite far away from the world in terms of research capacity and deployment methods in the telecommunications sector. Therefore, even though all countries have the same opportunity in terms of time to lead the research and deployment of 6G networks, not all countries have enough potential in science, technology as well as finance. join the race for core technology of 6G right now. Instead of racing to research core technologies, we should take advantage of other existing strengths to catch this wave, such as: Focusing on research and production of terminals for 6G; researching in-depth in the control and optimization of the 6G network system; research on AI technology for management system, data processing in 6G network system; blockchain security research (blockchain) … to solve the safety problem in the new network system. This may be a medium and viable market for Vietnam in the future.

Samsung Electronics has once again affirmed its leadership position in technology innovation with the iF Design Award, Red Dot Design Award 2021. The company claims to have received 71 awards at this famous award. There are 2 Gold Awards out of a total of 36 awards Samsung has won for Product Design, 10 awards for Professional Ideas, 11 awards for Communication Design, 5 for Packaging Design and 9 for User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI) and Service Design. The main highlight is the Samsung BESPOKE AX90000N air purifier that received the Gold Award of Honor. This product is like a real ornament. In addition, the company’s BESPOKE City Color Edition collection also attracts attention by many colors and materials for kitchen appliances such as refrigerators, ovens, induction cookers, … Color is inspired by many cities. different streets like Stockholm, Berlin and Seoul. Samsung’s latest 8K QLED TV has topped the awards in the Product category. In addition to the QLED TV, several other Samsung designs have won various awards such as The Premiere premium home projector featuring Triple Laser and Ultra Short Throw technology. Next is products like WW8000T Washing Machine & Dryer DV8000T that can be stacked, placed horizontally or independently. The Galaxy Z Fold2 and Galaxy Z Flip also won awards in the product category. Not only Samsung, LG also announced that it has received a total of 31 different awards in the Red Dot Award this year. LG awards for innovative home appliances including air purifiers and refrigerators. LG revealed LG’s new line of home appliances, the LG Objet Collection, which won six awards at the competition, with recognition in the material and surface categories for realizing color, material and finish. Products. In addition to the Red Dot award, LG also won 28 different awards at the German iF Design Awards. Award-winning products include home brewers, LG wearable air purifiers, and Micro LED signage. According to Gizmochina