Source: World Magazine
After several consecutive internal management problems such as yield fraud and the outflow of advanced process data, Samsung has a new situation. This time, Samsung's internal employees sent an open letter to Samsung executives on their personal blogs. The letter pointed out that if Samsung cannot make drastic changes in its corporate culture, it may fall behind its competitors in all product categories in the future, not just wafer foundry.
The employee pointed out that the company's infighting culture is serious, the shortage of research and development resources, in the face of higher and higher technical challenge threshold, in the case of difficult to overcome, can only cope with things, on the external fraud swing, resulting in semiconductor design and foundry career development serious delay, even the memory may also follow in the footsteps of foundry, thus surpassed by competitors.
Unlimited requirements for employees Senior executives take the lead in counterfeiting themselves
Why did Samsung get to where it is now? Samsung has always advocated the concept of class and inferiority in terms of corporate culture, there is no upper limit to employee performance requirements, and there can be no opinions, in the high-pressure situation, the departure situation has always been a high level of technology industry, a few years ago, the industry said that Samsung's turnover rate has been around 25%, showing that its unreasonable management will only make the talent continue to lose.
Even if employees stay, under the pressure of the upper echelons, they have almost no time to rest. Samsung even demanded that the South Korean government should loosen labor laws; executives argued that the 52-hour-a-week limit was clearly inadequate. Samsung's response to this is to work overtime as usual, but the extra working hours cannot be reported overtime. Although there have been improvements in recent years, Samsung is still one of the best sweat companies in the industry.
How much can this atmosphere contribute to the company? In fact, it can be seen from the recent situation of Samsung. Because it is impossible to meet the requirements, the result is that the senior supervisors themselves take the lead in counterfeiting, falsely claiming technological breakthroughs and product yields, but hurting the image and revenue of the company.
Face-to-face projects Mobile phones and memory are also lagging behind their opponents
At present, in terms of wafer foundry, Samsung's actual technology development has lagged behind TSMC significantly, and if it is no longer strengthened, then it is only a matter of time before it is surpassed by Intel.
But Samsung's problem is not only this, even the memory process development has recently been exposed by internal engineering personnel, its 12nm-based fifth-generation DRAM process 1 beta is not going well, and it is planned to skip the process and directly attack the 1c process based on 11nm.
In contrast to Micron's DUV-based 1 alpha process, Samsung wants to overtake Micron by purchasing EUV equipment. But in fact, Micron uses the lower cost DUV to successfully manufacture a higher density product, Samsung is still delayed in the density index, the latest DDR5 memory, Micron can also provide to the 1z generation, but Samsung can only reach 1y, the technology gap is getting bigger and bigger.
Samsung is expected to spend half a year to reach the 1C process and achieve a breakthrough over competitors, but the industry has little confidence, if Samsung can not achieve the goal, or even lie about technology and production capacity like a wafer foundry, then Samsung's memory empire may collapse overnight.
Employees who broke the news said that Samsung's vigorous promotion of EUV equipment in the memory business is actually a face-saving engineering requirement at the upper level, rather than a professional decision from front-line engineering personnel, because they feel that EUV equipment is more advanced in technology and can bring a better image. In terms of media public relations operations, Samsung has always emphasized how many EUV machines they have obtained, which can bring more advanced processes and better production performance, but has not revealed the actual contribution of these machines.
Therefore, the exposé employee said that Micron can achieve 1y and 1 alpha processes on the DUV machine, but Samsung can't get the same density when it gets EUV equipment, and the technology between the two has a significant gap. The situation is like the original Samsung wafer foundry used an EUV machine with great fanfare, but its first generation of EUV-based 7nm process was stillborn, while TSMC used a DUV machine to successfully mass-produce 7nm with more advanced technology and higher yield.
In terms of mobile phones, the latest S22 series products have been rumored to have falsified test data, and even the local market in South Korea has also reported refusal to buy, and even consumers want to file lawsuits against Samsung. The market is saying that Samsung in the mobile phone performance test is not new news, almost every generation of new product launches have been caught, Samsung in order to get consistent performance test results under different chip solutions, usually deliberately limit the performance of specific chip solutions; in addition, allow professional performance test software to perform at full strength, but in practical applications will greatly limit performance, hoping to reduce temperature and power consumption, these practices have also been widely criticized.
Another controversy is that Samsung mobile phones use their own 4nm Qualcomm processors and Exynos processors from Samsung's LSI department, due to process limitations caused by heat, but Samsung only uses higher efficiency heat dissipation designs such as heat shields in the highest-end Ultra version of S22, and the S22 general version and Plus version do not, which also makes consumers very dissatisfied. With the same Qualcomm processor, Samsung's performance is not as good as that of the Chinese mobile phone industry, and it is regarded as Samsung's insufficient adjustment power in mobile phone products, resulting in a significant decline in competitiveness.
Infighting in different departments is frequent and the high-level is unable to solve it
Samsung mobile phone, LSI department and wafer foundry department to form a prevarication triangle, Samsung mobile phone accused LSI of giving the program is not strong enough, the cost is high, LSI department is accusing the wafer foundry department of process yield and specification fraud, so that they can not make good products, the industry said that these three departments obviously belong to the same company, but insufficient horizontal communication with each other, can not achieve integration synergy, but drag each other down.
The whistleblower further said that Samsung's decision-makers have no idea what is happening below, which also means that Samsung's operation has entered an extremely dangerous stage; he pointed out that Samsung has a huge number of semiconductor employees who have left, such as DRAM technicians have jumped to Hynix and other companies, and the exodus rate has exceeded the turnover rate, which is a serious wake-up call for Samsung.
Corporate culture has become Samsung's deepest pain, and in the past, Samsung has also introduced reforms many times, such as proposing new reform measures in the personnel system this year, replacing the supervisor's score with peer ratings, and aligning with large American companies. And cancel the number of years of promotion requirements, while encouraging employees who have been in the company for more than five years to apply for transfer, expand career experience, avoid staying in the same field for too long, limit the vision and development space. At the same time, Samsung also encourages senior employee re-employment mechanisms to reduce the number of high-level layers and the number of people, and increase organizational flexibility.
However, Samsung has not tried to reform, the first few times have not been completely implemented, resulting in the current dilemma of Samsung, if this reform is not successful, I am afraid it is equivalent to declaring that Samsung's hegemony in many undertakings will be difficult to maintain.
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