Exicon is showing strong performance. News of a shortage of enterprise solid-state drives (SSD) appears to be influencing the stock price. Exicon operates memory inspection equipment business focused on post-processing for Samsung Electronics. For SSD testers and memory module testers, it is the dominant supplier to Samsung Electronics.
As of 9:28 AM on the 2nd, Exicon was trading at 32,450 KRW, up 5,100 KRW (18.65%) compared to the previous trading day.
According to the semiconductor industry, orders for enterprise SSDs from major global server companies have surged over the past 2 to 3 weeks, leading to market expectations that Samsung Electronics DS division’s operating profit for the first quarter of this year will reach the low to mid 10 trillion KRW range. Recently, as server companies have begun expanding storage to support artificial intelligence (AI) demand, ripple effects are spreading to the NAND market as well. Providing various forms of AI services or training AI requires large-capacity data storage devices, which is rapidly expanding into the NAND sector.
Samsung Electronics recently introduced several next-generation memory semiconductor solutions for the AI era, such as Compute Express Link (CXL) and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), at Silicon Valley in the United States. The company also announced plans to continue technological innovation based on these two product axes to address increasing memory performance challenges.
Vice President Hwang Sang-jun explained in the keynote speech at 'MEMCON 2024' held on the 26th of last month (local time) that CXL-based memory and high-performance, high-capacity HBM solutions are leading innovation in the industry in the AI era. He emphasized that CXL technology will lead in terms of capacity, and HBM technology will lead in terms of bandwidth in the future AI era.
Exicon is developing a CXL 2.0 tester. It was the first in Korea to commercialize the existing PCIe-based SSD Gen5 tester. Exicon is preparing CXL 2.0 and SSD Gen6 testers as its main products. Having already secured PCIe interface technology, the company is conducting various verifications to supply testers ahead of its customers’ mass production timelines.
An Exicon official said, "As the number one company in the domestic SSD tester market share, we will secure the CXL 2.0 and SSD Gen6 markets and maintain our position as the strongest player."
CXL is a newly proposed interface designed to more efficiently utilize accelerators, memory, and storage devices used alongside CPUs in high-performance computing systems. It can overcome the physical limitations of memory capacity in existing computing systems.
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
