2024-02-28 22:00:00
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered Korea through the Gimpo Business Aviation Center on the 27th. Photo = Lee Ho-jae
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Hello, readers interested in the information technology (IT) market. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is heating up the domestic IT industry with his visit to Korea starting on the 27th. It attracted attention as it was my first visit to Korea in 10 years. Zuckerberg had a busy day on the 28th, meeting LG Electronics CEO Jo Joo-wan for lunch and then having dinner with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong in the evening with his wife.
But the interesting point here is the dinner between Chairman Lee and Zuckerberg. It is said that Chairman Lee welcomed Zuckerberg and his wife alone without the presence of Samsung Electronics presidents and treated them to dinner. Samsung Electronics did not provide any specific details of the conversation other than this fact.
Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong (right) and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are traveling in their respective vehicles after having dinner at Seungjiwon in Seoul, Samsung’s guesthouse, on the 28th. Photo = Yonhap News
So my curiosity grows. What did they talk about at a dinner party with just the three of them? Also, what did you think about during the conversation that gave you new inspiration and ideas? [강해령의 하이엔드 테크]As it is a series that focuses on the semiconductor industry, we will try to estimate the conversations and thoughts they might have had about the ‘chip’ business. There are two main topics. It is an AI semiconductor for augmented reality (AR) and servers. It is divided into two parts. First of all, this episode is about AR chips. Let’s reconstruct their dinner last night, focusing on the data presented by Meta at the global semiconductor design conference ‘ISSCC 2024’ held in the United States last week.
ⓛCan Jaeyong Lee and Zuckerberg collaborate on smart glasses chips?
Zuckerberg has a special affection for smart glasses. On the 27th, in Japan, a person posted a picture of himself eating a hamburger at McDonald’s on his SNS account while wearing smart sunglasses made by Meta and Ray-Ban. Meta’s AR headset ‘Quest’ series is also his pride and pride.
He is devoted to research and development (R&D) with a strong belief that the current AR headset will be reduced to the size of the glasses we wear. A specific example is Meta’s ‘Aria Project’no see. This project was created with the dream of creating a technology that combines vivid AR and advanced AI computing functions in ordinary glasses.
Smart glasses designed by Meta’s Aria Project. Photo = Aria Project website
In order to implement such high-performance glasses, of course, appropriate ultra-high-performance semiconductors will be needed. Meta uses the AR application processor (AP) from Qualcomm, an American semiconductor design company, in its existing Quest series products. Aria Project, which develops smart glasses, is risking life and death to install its own AR chip.
Width 0.41, height 0.37cm. It seems like the smart glasses world that Mark Zuckerberg dreams of is hidden inside this small AR SoC. Photo = Meta ISSCC 2024 presentation material
At ISSCC 2024, Mehta presented a prototype design of a system-on-chip (SoC) that acts as the ‘brain’ in the Aria project’s smart glasses. Now, let’s take a brief look inside the SoC, which is 0.41 cm wide and 0.37 cm tall, made using a 7-nm process.
This chip, which is smaller than the size of a fingernail, is, in a word, an ‘exterior oil’. First of all, along with the central processing unit (CPU) that calculates information, there is a memory ‘SRAM’ with a capacity of 32MB that is built into the chip and quickly assists calculations. next to it Machine Learning Accelerator (ML Accelerator)There is. It is a device that very quickly learns and calculates various data received by smart glasses and delivers the resulting results in front of the user’s eyes. this 3MB of SRAM for accelerator only It looks like the bundles are placed separately on one side.
Metaman’s smart glasses SoC equipped with an augmented reality machine learning accelerator and 32MB SRAM. Data source = Meta ISSCC 2024 presentation material
Although SRAM has a faster data transfer speed than DRAM, the memory we are familiar with. It has a complicated structure, small capacity, and is expensive, so it has the disadvantage of not being able to be mounted as much as desired on the SoC. In a typical computing processor, SRAM with a capacity of at most a single digit MB is placed. Meta engineers’ determination to reduce information processing delay and minimize the ‘digital motion sickness’ phenomenon of smart glass users by increasing the SRAM capacity to several tens of MB in this chip.is visible.
Meta is planning to introduce hybrid bonding, the ultimate packaging technology that connects different chips to deploy an accelerator for optimizing machine learning for AR and multiple SRAMs to reduce computational latency. From an accelerator perspective, it seems like an extension of the V-cache technology that AMD is trying these days. They also revealed the results of an experiment showing that when the chips were connected in this amazing way, the smart glasses performed 40% faster when tracking hands. Data = Meta ISSCC 2024 presentation material
Well then, how on earth are they going to implement this much SRAM and advanced computing devices into a chip smaller than a fingernail? This chip found its answer in ‘combining’ two different chips. It is made by dividing it into two chips, and then uses the most advanced bonding technology to overlap the chips at very fine and precise intervals without crosslinking (bumps). Hybrid bonding technology is the hottest topic in the semiconductor industry these days. Inside this chip, 27,000 hybrid bonding wiring connections were implemented at 2 micrometer (㎛) intervals. It is an amazing technology that combines 16MB SRAM, another 16MB SRAM, machine learning accelerator, and SRAM vertically to create a single chip.
Panoramic view of the TSMC factory. Photo provided by TSMC
If you look at the chip data of the Aria project presented at ISSCC, traces of cooperation with TSMC, the number one foundry, can be seen everywhere. This is because the term ‘SoIC’ frequently appears in presentation materials. SoIC is TSMC’s own hybrid bonding brandJoe. In fact, so far in the foundry market Since TSMC is the only company that can perform heterogeneous bonding through hybrid bonding, Meta also has no choice but to utilize this company. This is an expert opinion.
Now let’s imagine Chairman Lee and Zuckerberg’s dinner together again. If Zuckerberg brought up the topic of AR semiconductors, I think he expressed these details in his own story and conveyed them to Chairman Lee. Chairman Lee must have thought a lot after hearing the thoughts of Mark Zuckerberg, whom he was facing. In fact, it is not that Samsung Foundry has not had any cases of collaboration with Meta on AR chips. In 2019, Samsung Electronics Semiconductor (DS) Division won an order to develop AP for 7-nano AR glasses from Meta (Facebook at the time). It is known that after various attempts, it was not possible to achieve mass production.
If Samsung and Meta are to attempt a chip alliance in this field, there must be something new and different from the past. It is presumed that Chairman Lee provided him with an answer or direction that Samsung Foundry can provide front-end process and combination technology that is different from TSMC in the AR field, or even that he received inspiration for a new foundry area.
Will Zuckerberg really gain trust that he can lead smart glasses leadership in the future if he collaborates with Chairman Lee here? Did Chairman Lee find a clue through this conversation that he could narrow the gap with TSMC by collaborating with Zuckerberg in the semiconductor industry? After the three people’s dinner, it seems necessary to take a closer look at the AR semiconductor cooperation between Samsung Electronics and Meta.
In the next episode, we will follow Zuckerberg, AI semiconductors for servers, and Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong’s thoughts on them.
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