Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered Korea via 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 warming 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. Chairman Lee is said to have welcomed Zuckerberg and his wife alone without the presence of the presidents of Samsung Electronics and treated them to dinner. Samsung Electronics did not provide any specific details about the conversation other than this fact.
Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong (right) and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg travel in their respective vehicles after having lunch at Seungjiwon in Seoul, the Samsung hotel, 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 inspiration and new ideas? [강해령의 하이엔드 테크]As it is a series focused on the semiconductor industry, we will try to estimate the conversations and thoughts they may 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 chapter is about AR chips. Let’s recreate 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 particular fondness for smart glasses. On the 27th, in Japan, a person posted a photo of himself eating a hamburger at McDonald’s on his SNS account while wearing smart sunglasses made by Meta and Ray-Ban. AR Meta’s ‘Quest’ series of headphones is also his pride and joy.
It is dedicated 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 ‘Project Aria’than 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 Aria Project Meta. Photo = Aria Project Website
To implement such high performance glasses will of course require very high performance semiconductors. Meta uses the AR application processor (AP) from Qualcomm, an American semiconductor design company, in its current 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. The world of smart glasses that Mark Zuckerberg dreams of seems to be hidden inside this tiny AR SoC. Photo = Meta ISSCC 2024 presentation material
At ISSCC 2024, Mehta presented a prototype system-on-chip (SoC) design 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.
In a word, this chip, which is smaller than the size of a fingernail, is ‘external oil’. First of all, together with the central processing unit (CPU) which calculates information, there is a ‘SRAM’ memory with a capacity of 32MB which is incorporated into the chip and which assists calculations quickly. next to him Machine Learning Accelerator (ML Accelerator)There are. It is a device that learns and calculates various data received by smart glasses very quickly and provides 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.
Smart glasses Metaman SoC equipped with 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 complex structure, small capacity, and is expensive, so it has the disadvantage of not being able to be installed as much as desired on the SoC. In a typical computer processor, SRAM is installed with a capacity of at most one digit MB. The decision of meta engineers to reduce delays in information processing and reduce the phenomenon of ‘digital motion sickness’ of smart glass users by increasing the SRAM capacity to several tens of MB in this chip.is visible.
Meta plans to introduce hybrid bonding, the ultimate packaging technology that connects different chips to use an accelerator for machine learning optimization for multiple AR and SRAM to reduce computing latency. From an accelerator point of view, 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 = ISSCC 2024 Meta presentation material
Well, then, how on earth are they going to implement that much SRAM and advanced computing devices into a chip that’s smaller than a fingernail? This chip found its answer by ‘combining’ two different chips. It is made by splitting it into two chips, and then uses the most advanced bonding technology to overlap the chips at very fine and precise intervals without cross-linking (bumps). Hybrid bonding technology is the hottest topic in the semiconductor industry these days. Inside this chip, 27,000 hybrid bonding wire contacts were implemented at intervals of 2 micrometers (㎛). It’s an amazing technology that vertically combines 16MB of SRAM, another 16MB of SRAM, a machine learning accelerator, and SRAM to create a single chip.
A 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’ appears frequently in presentation materials. SoIC is TSMC’s own brand of hybrid bondingJoe. Indeed, so far in the foundry market Since TSMC is the only company that can achieve heterogeneous bonding through hybrid bonding, Meta also has no choice but to use this company. This is an expert opinion.
Now let’s imagine Chairman Lee and Zuckerberg having 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 Mark Zuckerberg’s thoughts, which he was facing. In fact, Samsung Foundry has had no cases of collaboration with Meta on AR chips. In 2019, the Semiconductor Division of Samsung Electronics (DS) won an order to develop an AP for 7-nano AR glasses from Meta (then Facebook). It is known that, after various attempts, it was not possible to achieve mass production.
If Samsung and Meta want to try a chip alliance in this area, there must be something new and different from the past. It is assumed that Chairman Lee presented him with a solution or instruction that Samsung Foundry can provide process technology and front-end combination that is different from TSMC in the AR field, or even got inspiration for a new foundry area.
Will Zuckerberg really gain trust that he can lead the leadership of smart glasses in the future if he collaborates with Chairman Lee here? Did Chairman Lee find an idea through this conversation that he could close the gap with TSMC by collaborating with Zuckerberg in the semiconductor industry? After the three person lunch, it seems that the AR semiconductor collaboration between Samsung Electronics and Meta needs a closer look.
In the next episode, we will follow Zuckerberg, AI semiconductors for servers, and Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong in their thoughts.
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