‘Hwang’s Law’ Good for Another 10 Years
By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Semiconductor capacity will keep doubling every 12 months at least for the next 10 years, and so by 2015 there will be a 20-terabyte memory chip capable of containing all the books stored in the U.S. Library of Congress, said the semiconductor chief of Samsung Electronics Friday.
Hwang Chang-gyu, one of the most respected figures in the semiconductor industry, said that the law named after him will remain valid in the future as the memory chips will have more important roles in various industries including medicine, aerospace and energy.
He made the remarks at the Seoul Digital Forum, a three-day gathering of the technology industry, at the Sheraton Grande Walkerhill in eastern Seoul.
Currently, Samsung’s 32-gigabyte flash memory has the largest chip storage on the market. As one terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes, what Hwang insisted on Friday means that the capacity of a memory chips will almost double every year for the next 10 years in order to hold 20 terabytes, or 20,000 gigabytes of information.
The U.S. Library of Congress is considered as the largest store of information in the world, except for the Internet. It currently stores 29 million books on its 850 kilometers of bookshelves. Given that a book has on average one megabyte of information, the books in the library have 29 terabytes of information in total.
Hwang’s calculation counts only books, not including other paper and multimedia items in the library. According to a report from Rutgers University, the library also holds 13 terabytes of photographs, 200 terabytes of maps, 500 terabytes of movies and another 2,000 terabytes of sound recordings.
Hwang first enunciated ``Hwang’s Law’’ in 1999. The law is often compared to ``Moore’s Law’’ propounded by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore. Since then, the law has been proven correct as Samsung expanded its dominance in the memory chip industry.
On Friday, Hwang also predicted that the ``fusion’’ of information technology (IT), biotechnology (BT) and nano-technology (NT) will be the key development in the next decade.
The rapid growth of semiconductor technology has contributed to the mobility of consumer electronics in the past years, and it will play a even more important role in the future when the barriers between the IT, BT and NT will become invisible, he said.
In the near future, Hwang said that the earnings from flash memory will improve notably from the third quarter of this year after the price hit the bottom in May.
He said that the NAND flash memory prices have stabilized and the demand for chips will grow steadily in the second half.
He also predicted that the market of the flash-driven hard drives will amount to $500 million this year and then will start to inflate from next year.
Samsung is to release the flash replacement of hard disks beginning next month, calling it Solid-State Disk (SSD).
indizio@koreatimes.co.kr
05-26-2006 17:53 |
