[A Life without Semiconductors?] College Student Suyeon’s Semiconductor-less Life

What would happen if semiconductors suddenly disappeared from our lives one day? Although semiconductors sound complex and irrelevant to our lives, you are using semiconductors even at this moment as you read this article. Samsung Semiconstory is presenting “A Life without Semiconductors?” Series to teach you about the roles and the importance of semiconductors. Today, we are meeting Suyeon, a 23-year-old college student. Suyeon, confident that she would be able to go without semiconductors for a day, took on the challenge. However, her perspectives completely changed after today. What happened?

Suyeon is watching the news in the morning. A breaking news story is delivered, and the anchor says certain semiconductors will disappear for a short while throughout the day. “Come on. Semiconductors? It’s just for a day. I doubt anything will happen.”Under the assumption that the news is irrelevant to her, Suyeon heads out the door completely unbothered. Then, on her way to the subway, she gets her smartphone out to use the APP that shows her class schedule for the day. But no matter how many times she taps on the screen, it does not turn on. She runs into a problem right from the morning! What is going on? Semiconductors in smartphones, DDI, the screen interpreters Her screen stopped working because the DDI disappeared. Smartphones are now a necessity to people in this age, and they are the ultimate product of semiconductors. In smartphone screens, there is a logic semiconductor called the DDI. DDI (Display Driver IC) is the magician that operates the smartphone screen. An image sensor translates light energy into digital signals. Meanwhile, DDI is a logic semiconductor that translates digital signals into light energy so that each pixel on the screen is ordered to put on the right display. How, then, does DDI work? Let us say we are trying to print red on the smartphone screen. A pixel consists of RGB (Red, Green, and Blue). In order to display red on the screen, the pixel must receive the signal consisting of the red value among RGB. Here, DDI receives the digital signal ordering the pixel to print red and translates it into an analog RGB value. Then, the value is delivered to the display. Without DDI, the interpreter semiconductor for smartphone screens, we would not be able to use the screen at all.

It is still the morning, and there is a traffic jam. Suyeon, who commutes to school, heads into the subway station as always. She tries to tap her card on the machine, but she does not hear the beep. The gate is still closed. What happened? The wise commuter life! A tiny computer in a small chip, smart card IC Cards are an essential part of our lives! The golden chip shining on the plastic card is also a semiconductor. When we tap our cards on the ticket machine to pay for transit, we need semiconductors at work too. A smart card IC is an electronic card that contains a semiconductor integrated circuit that can carry a large amount of data. Compared to the previous generation of magnetic cards, the smart card IC has a larger storage space and enhanced security. Smart card ICs are used for not only bus cards but also for credit cards, electronic currencies, ID cards, employee passes and the like to make our lives safer and more convenient. With the micro IC chip with RFID technology, we can simply tap our cards on the card machine to process a transaction. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), also referred to as an electronic tag, is a system that reads the ID using frequencies. It can detect data from a far distance. That is why it is used for highway tollgates too.

After a long day, Suyeon’s way home feels more exciting than usual. Suyeon’s commute takes about an hour, which is why it is so important to have her smartphone and earphones charged. To kill time during her commute, she uses video streaming services like Netflix, Watcha, and the like. But as soon as she gets on the subway, she hears an announcement that yet another semiconductor has disappeared. “Don’t I just need the internet to stream videos online?” Suyeon underestimated this. She is very disheartened that Netflix is not working. Suyeon, who does not know much about semiconductors, is frustrated. What is going on this time? All of these videos are saved on a web server? Semiconductors for servers, a must for data centers It is a huge mistake to assume that streaming services only require the internet. OTT(Over The Top) services need large storage to store all of their videos, which is what a web server is. What operates the giant online storage is a data center, and at the heart of that, is a semiconductor. As we enter the age of high-capacity content and competition of on-demand content platforms, data consumption has increased as well. This then brings more attention to semiconductors for data centers. As companies other than Netflix, like Disney, AT&T, and other new companies jump into this OTT business, we are expecting a continual increase in server usage. Where do these platforms save their huge collection of videos? That would be a semiconductor memory for servers, which is like SSD (Solid State Drive) and DRAM!

Something we always do before going to bed! It is none other than uploading posts on social media. A social media fanatic, Suyeon, is trying to share her eventful day on her social media, where she reviews the photos she has taken throughout the day to share with others. However, this time, she cannot see a single photo of the thousands of photos she has on her smartphone. Suyeon, panicking, opens the social media app, which is also irresponsive. Which semiconductor disappeared this time? Photos are memories! Semiconductor memory, here to save your memories Her smartphone photo album and social media apps are not working because semiconductor memories have disappeared. Among semiconductor memories, there are fast and volatile memory, DRAM, and large-capacity and slower but non-volatile NAND flash. On smartphones, we have the UFS, a type of mobile NAND flash, as the embedded storage. And when we want to use a smartphone app to make simple tweaks in our photos, we use the DRAM as the extra memory in the central processing unit. With the semiconductor memory gone, it is no surprise that social media apps suddenly do not work, is it? Since there is no way to locate the uploaded images, the app cannot do anything. In particular, as the videos and images uploaded on social media have gotten bigger in size in the recent times, the role of semiconductor memory is becoming increasingly important for saving data. This was college student Suyeon’s day without semiconductors! Did you enjoy it? It was surprisingly easy to find semiconductors working all around us. Semiconductors are so closely related to us! We will be back with more intriguing and educational stories, so stay tuned.