OCP Global Summit: Breaking Memory Barriers With Open Technological Collaboration

In an era of fierce global IT competition, can “openness” and “strengthened collaboration through contribution” be the answer to challenges that the semiconductor industry currently faces? Samsung believes they can. Samsung Electronics participated in the 2023 OCP Global Summit, held in San Jose, California from October 17 to 19. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is the world’s largest organization to collaborate on open data center technologies. It launched in 2011 to innovate data center-related products and has announced more than 300 technologies so far, evolving into the world’s biggest technological innovation group with leading global IT corporations taking part. Attended by 4,000 industry players from all around the world, this year’s event had its grand kickoff under the theme “Scaling Innovation Through Collaboration.” Based on cooperation, the project aims to accelerate the development of open computing solutions in terms of efficiency, scalability, and sustainability. In a keynote speech, Samsung emphasized the importance of collaboration in the AI era and presented solutions for overcoming the challenges the memory industry is currently facing. The focus was on these innovative solutions and how they will play a role in leaping over the so-called “Memory Wall,” as well as efforts to expand collaboration in the OCP ecosystem.

Samsung Electronics Keynote Speech: How Collaboration Will Overcome AI/ML Era Challenges The artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) era is officially here. With the rapid development of data-centric technology, the amount of data required for processing large-scale language models such as ChatGPT is increasing exponentially. In contrast, development in memory technology has been falling behind, with its capacity seeing only a twofold increase every couple of years.

When memory capabilities are unable to keep up with the four areas of data processing — bandwidth, capacity, latency and power — the result is a phenomenon referred to as the “Memory Wall.” At the same time, the environmental impact of data processing is also growing because of the rising amount of power consumed by data centers. By 2030, it is estimated that data center power consumption will be more than 15 times that of 2020. These are the core issues challenging the memory industry today. At this year’s edition of the OCP Global Summit, JongGyu Park, Vice President of Samsung Electronics Devices Solutions and Head of the Solution Development, delivered a keynote speech titled, “Unleashing the Power of Collaboration: Overcoming Memory Challenges in the AI/ML Era.” Samsung Memory’s Integrated Total Solutions

To address the challenges faced by memory, Samsung presented total solutions across the entire vertical memory hierarchy. In addition, it shed light on the development of petabyte-scale ultra-high-density system technology and infrastructure innovations encompassing advanced packaging (AVP) technology.

• • Petabyte-scale SSD (PBSSD): Next-Generation Storage Solution With Ultra-High-Density

• Samsung Electronics also supports the open chiplet economy with advanced heterogeneous integration technology. In addition, the company is expanding the scope of usage of advanced packaging by developing cost effective packaging platforms like I-CubeE. I-CubeE uses a RDL interposer integrating Si-bridges, lowering package costs by 22% compared to existing silicon interposers. With similar signal/power integrity performance, it can support sizes larger than 4x reticles. It doesn’t end there. The company plans to collaborate with OCP partners, design, IP, EDA, and OSAT partners in an open ecosystem to support die-to-die (D2D) protocol and chiplet development and amply provide an advanced packaging platform to invigorate the open chiplet economy.

OCP: Samsung Electronics' Journey to Expanding Open Innovation Samsung Electronics believes that the open technology ecosystem will play a key role in overcoming memory challenges and has put in a lot of effort and investment to developing open-source technology and expanding the ecosystem. Since first participating in OCP in 2015, the stages of efforts contributing to open-source ecosystem development can be divided into three phases: adoption, growth, and proliferation. The proliferation phase, in which the open-source ecosystem becomes far-reaching, began in earnest in 2023. In kicking off this phase, Samsung Electronics has established and is implementing three strategies for the future spread of open innovation: establishing an open platform for collaboration, building an APAC community centered on the Asia-Pacific region like those of America and Europe, and open collaboration in environmental, economic, and social issues for sustainability. First, in July, the OCP Experience Center in Hwaseong, Korea — home of Samsung Memory — opened its doors. The center is expected to serve as a place to experience Samsung's various semiconductor products and technologies. It will also be the hub of an open platform for collaboration that creates cooperation opportunities among ecosystem partners to develop next-generation IT technology solutions and products. The Asia Pacific region is a hub for key members of the open-source ecosystem, such as semiconductor manufacturers, system/component makers, and data centers. Samsung Electronics recognizes the key role that this region plays both in the open-source ecosystem and in the tech landscape at large. As such, the company has built out an APAC community. One such effort in this direction was holding the OCP APAC Tech Day, which took place in Korea on July 4 this year. Moving beyond this year’s OCP APAC Tech Day, Samsung will continue to strengthen the open innovation ecosystem in the Asia Pacific region under the leadership of the OCP. As far as sustainability endeavors go, Samsung declared its participation in the OCP Sustainability Initiative last year and is continuing its efforts in the entire semiconductor value chain. This will be accomplished through open collaboration with stakeholders at each stage; from supply, to production, to the use of semiconductor products.

Three High-Performance, Low-Power Next-Generation Memory Solutions on Display Apart from Memory Wall challenges, there are also difficulties relating to energy reduction for sustainability, as well as the exponential growth of data requirements. To overcome these challenges, Samsung showcased three major next-generation memory solutions: the PBSSD, HBM3 with AVP technology, and 256TB SSD.

• • PBSSD: an Ultra-High-Capacity Solution With Maximized Power Efficiency The PBSSD, a petabyte-class ultra-high-capacity solution, combines Samsung’s latest V-NAND and device technologies to realize a system density approximately 50% higher than its precedent. The product provides scalability that can flexibly vary its capacity depending on what it’s used for. Through system-specific power optimization technology, it uses about 20% less energy than the existing system, dramatically increasing rack density in data centers. • HBM3: Improved Performance Through 3D AVP Technology High-bandwidth memory (HBM), which achieves an extremely high density by stacking multiple DRAMs vertically, is characterized by high data processing speed and low power consumption. It plays a key role in high-performance computing (HPC), such as generative AI, which is required to process large amounts of data at extremely high speeds. Samsung Electronics’ 12-layer stacked HBM utilizes next-generation 3D stacking packaging technology for improved performance and yield. With a processing speed of 6.4Gbps and bandwidth of 819GB/s, HBM3 is 1.8 times faster than the previous-generation DRAM while consuming 10% less power. • 256TB SSD: The Industry’s Highest Level of Density The 256TB SSD implements the industry’s highest level of density while also dramatically improving energy efficiency. A single 256TB SSD has the same capacity as eight 32TB SSDs stacked on each other but only consumes one-seventh of the power. This allows users to store the maximum amount of data within the power and physical space limitations of a single server rack.

At the OCP Global Summit, Samsung Electronics’ contributions to the OCP were on full display. Moving forward, the company will continue to expand collaboration across industry boundaries and strengthen cooperation to overcome the Memory Wall and develop technologies in pursuit of a sustainable future.

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