AI chips hold the key to Korea’s manufacturing

We must take this valuable opportunity before it’s too late.

Kim Yong-serkThe author is a professor of electronic engineering at Sungkyunkwan University and advisor to the Institute of Semiconductor Engineers.

Technological evolution changes the world. Technology acts as the driving force behind the advancement of civilization. Due to the faster speed in electronic technologies, changes have accelerated in the digital age much more dramatically than in the analog days. Japan’s Sony dominated the global analog consumer electronics market during the 1980s and ‘90s, with the world’s first and priciest audio, TV and computers.

Its first global hit was the transistor radio in 1955. It went on to awe global consumers with the first transistor black-and-white TV in 1960 and Trinitron color TV in 1969. But analog technology became outmoded as the mainstream technology shifted to digital. In the digital age, Korea’s Samsung and LG took the lead. By 2007, Samsung outran Sony to become the world’s No. 1 consumer electronics brand.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was the dominant theme at CES 2024, which was recently held in Las Vegas. Chipmakers as well as PC and smartphone makers all showed off new products powered by AI. Samsung Electronics, under the slogan “AI for All,” showcased an array of AI-enabled gadgets and devices. As digital technology accelerated digitalization across the industries, AI today is rapidly being incorporated and employed.

AI mimicking human brain power is a technology that scientists have been exploring since the ‘60s. In the ‘80s, it was dubbed an impractical technology requiring too much work to train the machine. But that was changed by the discovery of the deep-learning algorithm in the 2000s, and its commercialization was facilitated by the introduction of AI-supporting graphics processing unit (GPU) chips. As higher-performance memory chips became capable of executing numerous calculations and memory storage for deep-learning, AI technology became more accessible for wide business deployment. Advancements in chip capabilities enabled computing to connect machine learning to data inference.

AI is trained to learn a set of data and infer the outcome. AI chips cut short the learning and processing process. There are high-performance AI chips powering data centers and on-device AI chips that mount on end products.

Due to the proliferation of ChatGPT, the demand for high-performance GPU chips to support deep-learning cloud solutions has been explosive. U.S. chipmaker Nvidia dominates 90 percent of the global GPU market. The stock is one of the hottest on Wall Street. Korean memory giants SK hynix and Samsung Electronics are also enjoying the AI boom through their dominance in high bandwidth memory (HBM), crucial for AI power.

Edge chips enabling AI tasks on-device rather than in a remote data center are being rapidly deployed. They mounted on smartphones from 2017. Application processors have an AI core dubbed the neural processing unit that enables improvement in smartphone display quality, voice recognition, translation and interpretation capabilities. AI is being deployed not just on smartphones but on a range of everyday appliances like PCs, home appliances, cars, security devices and health care devices.

AI is essential to diversify and proliferate AI-enabled devices. AI can lead to infinite applications from the Internet of Things to datacenter applications backed by the fifth and sixth generation wireless technologies, autonomous vehicles, smart factories and smart cities. They are areas that could become the future backbone of the Korean economy.

Samsung and LG were able to prevail over Sony during the digital transition thanks to their development of system-on-chips. A digital TV would have competitiveness when it is powered by the self-developed chip. The competitiveness of a hardware set lies in the system-on-chips. The government has recently announced an outline to create a mega-cluster to build AI chip power. The project must serve as a watershed moment in building Korea’s fabless chip design power that currently makes up just 1 percent of the global share.

AI is still in its fledgling stage. Since there is no clear winner, Korea has a chance to command supremacy over the burgeoning sector if the government, corporations and universities join together in full force. We must take this valuable opportunity before it’s too late.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng daily staff.