Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. this week held the first Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE) Forum 2019 in the United States.

The forum has been designed to provide an opportunity for Samsung’s partner companies to directly meet with customers and discuss comprehensive design technology infrastructure -- including electronic design automation, intellectual property, cloud, design service, and packaging -- which is critical to efficiently develop and manufacture semiconductor products.

While the Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) has served as a channel to present Samsung’s technology roadmap to customers, the newly held SAFE Forum allows its partners to engage deeper and enables more efficient collaboration within Samsung's foundry ecosystem by directly communicating in detail with customers on their own design support solutions proven by Samsung.

“The SAFE program has grown in quality over the past two years; it has expanded the number of competitive partnerships and support of flexible product design for customers as well as bolstered the relationship between our partners, customers, and Samsung foundry,” said Jae-hong Park, executive vice president of Foundry Design Platform Development at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue our efforts in enhancing accessibility to enable customers to more easily utilize Samsung's excellent foundry solutions.”

As the latest system-on-chip (SoC) product requires more sophisticated features in a smaller surface size than before, the number of considerations in IC design optimization has increased exponentially: performance, power, security, design, density, etc.

To actively respond to these IC design trends and lower the design barrier for developing competitive SoCs, Samsung Electronics launched the SAFE program in early 2018.

Samsung is trying to catch up with Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s biggest foundry business, by aggressively expanding its chip manufacturing capacity.

The Korean company is nearing completion of an extreme ultraviolet lithography line in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, this year and will start operations next year.

TSMC dominated the foundry market with a 50.5 percent in the third quarter of 2019, while Samsung accounted for 18.5 percent, according to data by market researcher TrendForce.