Samsung advances technology for green electronics

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd announced that over the past year it has succeeded in introducing more than a half dozen technological advancements that extend battery life in notebooks, MP3 players, digital cameras, video camcorders, multimedia phones and cellular handsets.

These design improvements are part of a concentrated effort by the company to move to more energy-efficient chip and display designs, utilizing nano-scale technology breakthroughs, new sensor technology and advanced manufacturing techniques.

'Great strides'
"Anticipating the increasing need for energy-conserving, power-efficient products, we have made great strides in getting laptops and mobile devices to run faster and longer by aggressively pursuing the development of more efficient chips," said Kevin Lee, VP, memory marketing Samsung Semiconductor Inc.

"We have challenged our R&D teams to develop new displays based on advanced technology that will not only produce better user experiences, but at the same time, improve the energy-efficiency of consumer electronics," added Scott Birnbaum, VP, Samsung LCD Business.

Over the past seven months, Samsung Semiconductor has made major energy-saving advancements in a wide range of components that together have a substantial effect on prolonging battery life. Among the products are solid state drives that consume a third of the laptop power (.5W) consumed by comparably sized HDDs (1.5W). Also, 2.1-inch LCD screens extend battery life in mobile phones by automatically adjusting the screen brightness to reduce the amount of backlighting when ambient lighting is already sufficient.

80% power savings
Samsung SoCs for hybrid hard drives reduce laptop power consumption up to 80 percent compared to conventional HDDs. Meanwhile, embedded DRAM features 40 percent power reduction in mobile devices when designed into SoCs, such as Samsung's DV-1 chip, for mobile devices including next-generation smart phones, portable music players and handheld PDAs.

CMOS image sensors for mobile phone cameras now use 1/10 the power of widely used CCD image sensors, reducing battery consumption and power charges while prolonging the usage span of CE devices such as mobile phone cameras and digital still cameras.

New Mobile DRAM chips (using 80nm production process) with temperature sensors reduce mobile phone power drain by more than 30 percent. In addition, DDR3 memory chips use only 1.5V of power and adopt improved circuit designs with a reduction in power consumption by more than 20 percent over DDR2.

Samsung also uses a new wafer-level-processed stacked packaging technique that reduces current leakage in multistack memory packages another 30 percent.

The company plans to deliver more power savings for laptops and mobile devices with new generations of "fusion memory" chips, such as the OneDRAM chip developed earlier this year.