sponsorships
Samsung Olympic Games
Campaign Launch in Beijing
With the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games now just one year away, Samsung has announced it’s Olympic Ambassador to the 2008 Games: Liu Xuan, a Chinese gymnast who won the first gold medal for his country on the balance beam at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Samsung announced Liu’s appointment to the ambassadorship post—previously held by Olympian athletes such as Australian runner Cathy Freeman at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, and Italian skier Alberto Tomba at the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games—at the Samsung Olympic Games Campaign Launch held in Beijing’s Diaoyutai State Guesthouse last June. Also announced in Beijing were the creation of the Samsung Olympic Games Visual Identity System (SOVIS), Samsung’s Olympic Torch Relay Plan, and plans to create anew the Olympic Rendezvous @ Samsung (OR@S) pavilion that was a hit at previous Olympic Games. Samsung looks forward to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

exhibitions
CommunicAsia meets the Ultras
At the annual CommunicAsia show, Samsung showcased a total of 53 mobile phones and its latest mobile technologies, including the Ultra Edition II 12.1 (U700), the slimmest and elegantly designed HSDPA slider; the Ultra Edition II 10.9 (U600) 2.5G slider; and an exciting fashion phone lineup including the SGH-E950, E840, and J600. The Ultra Edition II is the best of advanced technology, with red-hot design and powerful handsets in each form factor. Samsung also used CommunicAsia to show its latest developments with WiMax technology.

product development
5-megapixel mobile
This August, Samsung introduced the world’s first 5 megapixel GSM phone to the European market. The new SGH-G600, a sleek metallic slider phone with an impressive 2.2-inch LCD screen, introduces a new level of photographic sophistication to GSM phones.
In addition to the standard mobile phone features, the elegant G600 also delivers features typically found on premium point-and-shoot cameras such as panorama, macro, and mosaic settings, a built-in power LED flash, image stabilizer, image enhancer, and more. The Samsung G600: A brilliant step forward in GSM telephony.

manufacturing
New NAND flash plant in Texas
Samsung has announced a new $3.5 billion NAND flash memory wafer plant in Austin, Texas. The 1.6 million square foot plant—as large as nine football fields and one of the largest buildings in Austin—is also one of the largest single semiconductor facilities in the United States. According to Texas Governor Rick Perry, the new facility is the single largest foreign investment in Texas history. The new fab will be used to manufacture NAND flash memory chips, increasingly ubiquitous in nearly every digital appliance, and will sit adjacent to another large manufacturing plant where Samsung DRAM is now made. That plant, which cost about $1.4 billion in 1996, was also the largest foreign investment in Texas—until now.

memory
Fast track success for 50-nano DDR2
In July, Samsung announced that its 50 nanometer-class DDR2 (double data rate) DRAM—the industry’s most advanced DRAM (dynamic random access memory)—had been certified by Intel Corporation to work with Intel’s existing and next-generation chipsets at speeds of 800 megabits per second (Mbps). Samsung is the only company that has successfully developed the 50nm-class DRAM. The new chip design is capable of doubling the productivity of a 1Gb DDR2 DRAM fabricated using 80nm process technology and will improve production
efficiency by 50 percent over DRAM using the 60nm fabrication process.