IEF: Samsung wants a skunk-works

Samsung Electronics is setting up a center in Silicon Valley to try to inject new ideas into the company that will ultimately drive volume for its chipmaking operation.

The center will have a different focus to the R&D centers that the South Korean giant already has in place. The idea is to be “away from the mothership”, Young Sohn, chief strategy officer, said today at Future Horizons’ International Electronics Forum 2012 in Bratislava, Slovakia.

“In Korea, the expertise is in device physics. What we have to do is find new applications and new architectures,” Sohn said. “Things that have a more innovative angle and which are not focused on manufacturing.”

In his speech at IEF2012, Sohn pointed to the way in which skunk-works operations at companies such as Apple, Lockheed and Sun Microsystems had put together novel products without hindrance from corporate influence. To deal with some of the potential growth markets he sees where it will be important to develop new architectures rather than build on existing technologies.

Sohn identified three areas he sees as pivotal to growth in electronics in the near future: the internet of things; a generation of cloud-computing architectures; and sub-$100 phones for the ‘I2I’ market, the ribbon of countries that run from Ivory Coast to Indonesia.