Samsung Selects Chinese Firm For Chipsets

China-based wireless baseband chipset provider Spreadtrum Communications has become Samsung's newest supplier.
##CONTINUE##
Spreadtrum's QS520 GSM/GPRS and QS1001 EDGE transceivers have been designed into Samsung's mobile phone models that are to be shipped internationally. The company says it has commenced volume shipment of these two products to Samsung.

Dr. Leo Li, Spreadtrum's president and CEO, stated, "We have developed competitive GSM/GPRS and EDGE transceivers, and it feels great to have a world-class customer confirm this. We will work with Samsung to achieve a smooth ramp-up of these products and cooperate with Samsung in future products."

The Spreadtrum QS520 GSM/GPRS and QS1001 EDGE chips are among the most advanced in the industry in terms of radio performance and power consumption.

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BY N/A
Source：China Tech News

Copyright 1999-2009 ChinaTechNews.com. All Rights Reserved.

Samsung Launches Mobile Movie Service

The company also unveiled its Tocco Ultra Edition media-enabled cell phone in Europe to coincide with the service.
##CONTINUE##
Samsung Mobile has launched a movie store in the United Kingdom and Germany to coincide with the availability Thursday of its 2.8-inch full touch-screen Tocco Ultra Edition cell phone.

Samsung said its Samsung Movies is debuting with more than 500 "blockbuster" movies for subscribers.

The service will eventually be available in other European countries, Samsung said, noting that the service will be powered by Acetrax. Initially available movies will include such recent hits as The Dark Knight and Iron Man with popular TV titles E.R. and Friends also offered through the online movie store.

The Tocco Ultra Edition mobile phone, which has an active matrix organic light emitting diode full touch screen, was also unveiled Thursday in the United Kingdom to take advantage of the movie service. The handset provides more than four hours of continuous movie watching on a full charge, Samsung said.

"Additional devices will be compatible with the Samsung Movies store as they come to market in 2009," according to a Samsung release.

Titles from studios including Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, and Momentum Pictures are being offered initially. By the end of June, Samsung anticipates that 2,000 movies and TV shows will be available.

The company said it eventually plans to offer the service on notebooks, MP3 and MP4 players, as well as on Samsung TVs. A 24-hour rental will incur a charge of $3.55 to rent and about double that to purchase a movie outright.

Digital movie retailer Acetrax has agreements with a range of movie studios and independent movie makers. The Acetrax platform enables European brands to provide video downloads including movies for viewing on PCs, mobile devices, and IP-enabled TVs.

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BY W. David Gardner
Source：InformationWeek

Copyright © 2009 United Business Media LLC, All rights reserved.

Stanford, Samsung Researchers Aim to Build Better Flexible Organic Electronics

Speedier flexible electronics possible with new fabrication process

A clever but simple new way of making transistors out of high-performance organic microwires presents a potential path for products such as smart merchandise tags, light and cheap solar panels, and flexible "digital paper." Engineers at Stanford and Samsung report the new method in a paper to be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
##CONTINUE##
Academic and industrial researchers have been toiling all decade to create flexible electronics based on inexpensive organic materials. These materials can be cheaper than silicon and metal materials (albeit slower in performance), and amenable to cheaper manufacturing processes such as roll-to-roll printing of photovoltaic cells. They are also more compatible with flexible substrates, such as plastics.

"This paper brings together progress on key aspects of building flexible organic electronics," said Zhenan Bao, a Stanford associate professor of chemical engineering and a senior author of the paper. "In our process we can create organic semiconducting microwires with the most desirable electronic properties, flow a dispersed solution of them into a stencil, or mask, and then stamp them onto a pattern of electrodes. Because these wires can be precisely aligned with high density, the result is high-performance transistors."

Although the research alone is not enough to enable economical mass production of low-cost, high-performance flexible electronics, it could make their eventual manufacturing more feasible, said Jong Min Kim, a Samsung Fellow and senior vice president and a co-author of the paper.

"This technology can be applied to printable electronics such as low-cost and large-area display device components, radio frequency ID tags, sensors, memory devices and many different types of energy devices," Kim said.

In electronics, transistors act as switches. The team reported measurements showing that in their "on" state—when they transmit current—the group's dense microwire transistors operated about two-and-a-half times more quickly than the organic transistors most other research groups have announced to date. The transistors also transmit more current. In a flexible electronic display, faster operation results in blur-free motion, and higher current yields a brighter picture.

The performance improvements come from three factors, Bao said: the inherently fast conductivity of the single crystalline microwires, the new alignment method they developed and the ability to pack a high density of wires onto the electrodes. Because almost all of the wires span the electrodes, a large number of them make the connection, ensuring that more current gets across.

The Stanford-Samsung team's transistors are also among the best of a rare breed of organic "n-type" transistors, which transmit negative charges. They are just as necessary as more common "p-type" transistors for making integrated circuits, but have been harder to build.

In addition, the microwires, made from a chemical called BPE-PTCDI, are formulated to be "air stable," meaning that their electrical properties aren't spoiled by exposure to oxygen, as are many n-type organic transistors. Prototype process

Because the process depends only on a stencil to align and concentrate the wires, the team was able to create patterns in which wires could be aligned in different directions in different places, a necessary capability for producing complex circuit designs. Also, Bao said, the team fabricated transistors over an area of several square centimeters, which suggests that patterning a large area could be feasible.

Demonstrating patterning over larger areas is a key goal for future work, Bao said. The team also hopes to study whether the technique could allow for more cost-effective fabrication of devices such as solar cell panels that use inorganic and organic micro- or nanowires.

In addition to Bao and Kim, other authors of the paper include chemical engineering postdoctoral scholars Joon Hak Oh and Stefan Mannsfeld, chemical engineering doctoral student Hang Woo Lee, chemistry doctoral student Randall M. Stoltenberg, former chemical engineering undergraduate student Eric Jung, Samsung engineer Yong Wan Jin and Sungkyunkwan University engineering Professor Ji-Bum Yoo. Funding sources include the U.S. National Science Foundation, Samsung, a Korea Research Foundation Fellowship and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

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BY David Orenstein
Source：Dr. Dobb's

© 2009 TechWeb.

Taiwan's VIA Pushes New Processor To Samsung

Samsung has adopted the VIA Nano processor, made by Taiwan's VIA Technologies, in the new Samsung NC20 mini-notebook.
##CONTINUE##
Combining the power efficiency of the 1.3+GHz VIA Nano processor with the VIA VX800 system media processor, the Samsung NC20 also features a 1280×800 12.1″ display in a portable device that weighs 1.52 kilograms.

Mobility is enhanced by 802.11b/g and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, and a six-cell battery that provides up to 6.5 hours of use independent of any power supply, while storage options include either a solid state disk or a SATA hard disk drive.

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BY N/A
Source：China Tech News

Copyright 1999-2009 ChinaTechNews.com. All Rights Reserved.

Samsung develops 40nm DRAM technology

Korea's Samsung has produced what it claims to be the world's first 40nm DRAM memory. Though only available in a 1GB DDR2 format, the memory is already said to have been certified for Intel's GM45 Express chipset, which was made available for notebooks late last year. The new DRAM marks a shift down in size from 50nm, and should theoretically consume less electricity, generating less heat as a side effect.
##CONTINUE##
The company says it is accelerating migration to 40nm, and expects mass production to occur within about a year. A 2GB DDR3 module is slated to be ready before the end of 2009, and Samsung also notes that the production technology will be instrumental in shifting from DDR3 to DDR4 as the peak standard. DDR4 SDRAM is, in general, not expected to reach the market until 2012.

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BY N/A
Source：electronista

All contents copyright © MNM Media, LLC (MacNN) 2009.

三星推出手机应用程序下载网店

三星今天宣布推出手机应用程序下载网店Mobile Applications，支持Symbian S60和Windows Mobile操作系统，消费者可为其三星手机下载喜欢的应用程序。
##CONTINUE##
在正式面向消费者发布前，此项服务将主要面向开发人员，供开发者向三星手机用户展示和销售其程序产品。三星全球营销经理菲尔·诺森(Phil Northam)表示，所有三星移动创新者园地(Samsung Mobile Innovator)的成员通过其账户可以使用该项服务。

三星将于本月中旬举行的2009移动通信世界大会上正式面向消费者发布，选择出适用于Symbian S60和Windows Mobile操作系统手机的1100个应用程序。三星还计划在今年晚些时候进行升级，支持适用于其他操作系统的应用程序。

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文章出处：新浪科技
作者：王飞

Samsung Plans New Netbook, Smart Phones

Samsung Electronics plans to follow-up its NC10 netbook in the coming few months with a new model and expand its range of smart phones with models based on a number of different operating systems, it said Friday.
##CONTINUE##
"In the first half of this year, for touch-screen phones we will expand our line-up and upgrade some of the functions including the user interface and for smart phones expand our line-up and provide various OSes to satisfy the diverse needs of our customers," said Chi Youngcho, head of the recently created digital media and communications unit, in a conference call with analysts.

Samsung already offers phones based on the Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux operating systems but perhaps most anticipated is an announcement from the company concerning a phone based on the Android OS developed by Google.

Samsung is a member of the Open Handset Alliance group formed around Android but has yet to show a phone running on the platform.

Chi also said Samsung plans to "expand our PC business by launching a new netbook."

No other details were disclosed but a follow-up to the NC10 has been rumored for a while. Internet reports late last year had the computer, called the NC20, launching around February and based on Via Technologies' low-power Nano processor.

If true that would be a departure from most competing machines, which almost all run the same Intel Atom processor. It would also be somewhat of a coup for Via, which has struggled to gain share from Intel in the mainstream market for years.

The NC10 was launched in the latter half of 2008 and, like most netbooks, is based on Intel's Atom processor and Windows XP. It has a 10.2-inch screen.

Netbooks have become popular with consumers, who are attracted by their compact size and low price. The market was created in 2007 when Asustek Computer launched its Eee PC and grew quickly to initially attract fellow Taiwanese competitors and then major laptop brands jumped into the market.

Earlier this month Sony, which had not launched a netbook, launched its Vaio P-series machines which are netbook-size laptops but based on the higher-specification Intel Atom Z520 chip.

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BY Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
Source：PCWORLD

Technology slowdown hits Samsung

Samsung Electronics of South Korea on Friday echoed the technology sector gloom foreshadowed Thursday by LG Electronics, Nokia, Sony and Microsoft, when it reported its first-ever quarterly loss, helping to send Asian stock markets lower.
##CONTINUE##
The world's biggest manufacturer of memory chips and liquid crystal displays has been badly hit by a collapse in demand and price pressures in those segments. It reported Friday an operating loss of 937 billion won, or $672 million, for the October-December quarter compared with a 1.78 trillion profit during the same period a year earlier. The loss was below what analysts had expected.

But Samsung finished the quarter with a net loss of 22.2 billion won. It had been expected to report net loss of 256 billion won, according to a survey of 11 analysts by Reuters. The net loss was helped by tax refunds and earnings from affiliates outside South Korea.

Sales at Samsung's chips division last quarter fell 18 percent from June-September, and LCD sales declined 12 percent, showing how rapidly the financial crisis and credit squeeze following the collapse of U.S. banking giant Lehman Brothers in mid-September prompted companies and consumers to rein in spending.

The lower sales resulted in a loss of about 560 billion won for Samsung's semiconductor division.

Samsung, the world's second-largest chipmaker after Intel, had been expected to post an operating loss of 440 billion won on sales of 4.72 trillion won from the chip business, according to a Bloomberg survey.

The chip sector, in particular, is suffering. It is capital intensive, while price pressure sent computer memory chips down 42 percent in the final three months of 2009, according to Dramexchange Technology, operator of the biggest Asian spot market for chips, Bloomberg News reported.

Widening losses have forced chip makers in Taiwan to seek government aid, while Hynix Semiconductor of South Korea, the world's second-largest computer-memory maker, received financial aid from creditor banks.

With no improvement in the global economy expected until much later this year, at the earliest, companies like Samsung, Sony and automakers around the world are set for an even tougher time in this quarter forcing many into painful cost cuts and restructuring.

A string of company results has highlighted the deteriorating environment this week.

LG Electronics, which makes mobile phones and flat screen televisions, swung to its first net loss in seven quarters and said Thursday that it expected sales and profitability to decline further this year.

Nokia, the Finnish cellphone maker, reported Thursday a sharper fall in profits than analysts had projected and said it expected global cellphone sales to fall another 10 percent.

Microsoft announced the first significant lay-offs in its 34-year history after reporting a slump in profits for the quarter that ended December. The company plans to lay off 5,000 employees, or 5 percent of its work force.

Sony announced after the close of trade in Tokyo on Thursday that it expected to report a loss of $3 billion for the 12 months ending in March. Sony shares on Friday reacted with a 6.2 percent plunge, helping to send the Nikkei 225 stock share down 2.3 percent.

In Seoul, Samsung fell 3.6 percent and LG declined 4.7 percent.

More bad news is expected in coming weeks as companies like Toyota and Toshiba release their earnings.

-----------------------------
BY Bettina Wassener
Source：International Herald Tribune

Copyright © 2009 the International Herald Tribune All rights reserved.

Samsung shines new light on its MBP200 Pico Projector for mobile phones

##CONTINUE##
Samsung shed light on its new MBP200 Pico Projector today in Las Vegas at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. The MBP200 is a pocket-sized projector that uses Texas Instruments' DLP pico chip. The MBP200 measures in at 107.3mm x 48.8mm x 19mm (4.2" x 1.9" x .75") and weighs only 160g (5.6oz).

The Samsung MBP200 is capable of projecting an image up to 50", though it also features a 2.2" QVGA (240x320 pixels) resolution display for private viewing. A microSD card slot is also included and the MBP200 can playback most video files directly from the memory card.

The Samsung MBP200 also features a standard 3.5mm audio port for personal headphones or an external speaker. Samsung plans to launch the MBP200 later this year, though pricing information was not announced.

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BY Ricky Cadden
Source：mobile burn

三星挖角台积电员工扩充晶圆代工版图

继英特尔大连工厂向中芯国际挖角后，近期三星电子亦传出借着台湾晶圆代工厂无薪休假的机会，瞄准台积电进行员工挖角。

##CONTINUE##

由于台积电在无薪假政策下，等于变相减薪约15%，因此，三星开出的条件相对诱人。业内人士表示，三星在晶圆代工领域是台积电可敬的竞争对手，但过去三星在晶圆代工业务通常是采用低价策略较多，对于近期三星挖角人才动作，后续效应有待观察。

业内人士指出，过去三星、IBM与新加坡特许(Chartered)同属于IBM技术阵营联盟，在市场上打着IBM共通技术平台旗帜各自接单生产，以同一技术来源、3座晶圆代工厂为口号，吸引客户下代工订单，其中，新加坡特许是纯晶圆代工厂，代工业务熟稔，而IBM本厂量产成本恐较高，至于三星向来就是以低价突袭市场策略为主。

业内人士透露，近期三星可能接获赛灵思(FPGA)代工订单，应是促使三星积极向台积电挖人的原因，而包括台积电内部几个部门，都已被三星锁定挖角，三星打算趁此机会壮大晶圆代工事业及市场版图，由于台积电员工堪称是业界“最好用”的员工，加上适逢台湾晶圆代工厂产能利用率下滑、纷纷施行无薪休假，许多员工薪资都缩水或遭变相减薪约15%，人心难免浮动，成为挖角人才的好机会。

此外，台积电、中芯国际均表示，尽管人事冻结，但暂时还没有裁员计划；至于联电则传出裁员百人消息，但随即遭联电否认。

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文章出处：新浪科技

记者：向东

Samsung To Pay CNY50 Million For Patent Infringement In China

According to the decision announced by the Intermediate People's Court of Hangzhou, the Korean electronics maker Samsung has been ordered to pay CNY50 million compensation to the Zhejiang-based Holley Communications for infringing the patent of Holley's GSM/CDMA dual-mode handsets.

##CONTINUE##

This he patent infringement case decision is the largest-ever compensation amount in China's mobile phone industry.

Holley Communications applied for the patent of technologies that allow mobile phones to operate on both CDMA and GSM networks on January 15, 2002. Its patent covers the major hardware design theories and the realization methods of GSM/CDMA dual-mode communications products.

On April 9, 2007, Holley Communications sued Samsung at the Intermediate People's Court of Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai. The company said Samsung violated its patent and required the defendant to stop the violation and pay compensation. On May 8, 2007, Samsung handed in a request to China's State Intellectual Property Office and asked the office to declare that the patent of Holley Communications was invalid and withdraw the patent.

After six months of investigation, the State Intellectual Property Office announced on December 14, 2007 that the patent of Holley Communications was valid. Based on this fact, the Intermediate People's Court of Hangzhou started to hear the case on May 14, 2008 and announced the decision on December 19, 2008, ending the 20-month dispute.

Ge Chen, executive director for Holley Communications, told local Chinese media that the CNY50 million compensation does not equal the total economic loss of Holley Communications. Samsung has sold over 700,000 mobile phones that contain Holley Communications' patent technologies and these products are still sold in markets. The compensation is only part of the sales. He emphasized that Holley Communications will continue to seek compensation from Samsung.

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BY N/A

Source：China Tech News