Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. might not be the most secretive player in the technology world, but it's in the running.

So it's no surprise that the company would have little to say about what products it will make as part of the gigantic plant expansion it has announced for its Northeast Austin manufacturing complex.

For the first time since the complex opened 14 years ago, Samsung will make products in Central Texas that aren't memory chips. Samsung used to make DRAM — the most common kind of computer memory — at Fab 1 
in Austin. The fabrication plant now makes flash memory — most commonly used in cell phones and other mobile devices — in Fab 2, Phase 1.

But for the expansion, known as Fab 2, Phase 2, the company says it will make LSI — large-scale integration — chips designed for use in mobile devices. Much of the rest of the chip industry usually calls those chips SoCs, for system on a chip.

Such chips typically have a processing core plus other peripheral functions that can include communications, memory controllers, multimedia acceleration, keypad and touch-screen controllers, display controllers and even wireless communications controllers.

In a world of battery-powered portable devices, such power-conserving devices are crucial.

That's why Samsung a few years ago teamed with a small Austin design company, Intrinsity Inc., to develop the first of a family of chips it called "Hummingbird," which managed to squeeze considerable performance out of a chip that only sipped electrical power.

Industry analysts since have speculated that Samsung made a derivative of Hummingbird that became Apple Inc.'s A4 processor, first used in the iPad tablet computer launched this year. The Hummingbird is based on a widely used Cortex A8 chip design that many companies have licensed from chipmaker ARM Ltd. But Intrinsity added a number of design tweaks to make Hummingbird run about two-thirds faster than similar chips.

David Carey, who works with UBM TechInsights, a high-tech detective firm with operations in Austin, said his company's analysis shows that Hummingbird and A4 are related.

"We are not saying they are the same chip, but they do have a common DNA," Carey said. That makes them akin to siblings or close cousins.

Samsung has projected that its production of new SoC chips is geared toward mobile devices and digital TV sets, which some analysts expect will soon have the electronics inside to enable them to directly connect to the Internet. To make that happen, you need to have an integrated processor inside, something like Hummingbird. It doesn't hurt that Samsung is among the world's largest makers of flat-panel TV sets.

So what does all that add up to?

It indicates that Samsung is making a big bet — $3.6 billion, the cost of the new Austin expansion — on two things: the continued growth of Apple, which is already a major customer; and its own strong prospects for making lots of smart phones, tablet computers and digital TV sets.

When analyst Will Strauss with Forward Concepts heard about Samsung's expansion project in Austin, "Hummingbird was the first thing that entered my mind," he said.

And, as it turns out, Austin is a very good place to design SoCs. Intrinsity helped Samsung develop the first Hummingbird chip, but the company was bought by Apple in a deal that Apple acknowledged in April.

Bob Russo, who was CEO of Intrinsity when it took on the Hummingbird design project, said the South Korean company is following through with a game plan he presented to them three years ago.

"I was trying to convince them to buy us," meaning Intrinsity, Russo said, adding that coupling solid energy-efficient processors with Samsung's ability to engineer and manufacturer a complex chip with multiple functions adds up to a winning combination.

"They have the capability of putting all these components together and delivering them to customers with great reliability and great yields and low costs," Russo added.

Samsung didn't buy Intrinsity, but it looks like it wants to tap into Austin's chip design expertise.

The South Korean company announced June 8 that it had created its first ever chip engineering design center in Austin. That center is being headed by Keith Hawkins, who formerly was an engineering manager for Sun Microsystems in Austin. That design team is expected to grow to 50 people by the end of this year.

By: DocMemory
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