Reshuffling its board membership, Samsung Electronics has nominated its chief of chip business, CTO, awaiting finalisation in March. Dr Hyuk Jae Lee from Seoul National University is set to join as an external director as well.
Samsung Electronics has announced the nomination of Young Hyun Jun, the head of its chip business, and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Jai-hyuk Song to join its board, aiming to enhance its semiconductor division amid ongoing challenges.
The South Korean tech giant also revealed in a regulatory filing that it has proposed the appointment of Dr Hyuk Jae Lee, a semiconductor expert and head of Seoul National University’s semiconductor research centre, as an outside director.
Last year in May, Young Hyun Jun was appointed as the new Head of the Device Solutions (DS) Division to oversee its semiconductor business and strengthen its competitiveness in a challenging global market.
Jun, who joined Samsung in 2000, has extensive experience in the semiconductor and battery sectors, having previously led the Memory Business and served as CEO of Samsung SDI. He had headed the Future Business Division.
On the other hand, Jai-hyuk Song is the Corporate President and CTO of Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions Business, where he leads its semiconductor R&D centre and mechatronics research centre.
Before his current role, Song served as EVP and Head of the semiconductor R&D centre, overseeing a wide range of R&D activities, including innovation in memory, advanced logic, new memory, and CIS device technologies.
He began his career as a DRAM process engineer at Samsung in 1996 and held various management roles in flash memory products and technology development. According to the company, he was instrumental in the development of NAND flash memory, notably the transition from planar 2D to the industry-standard vertical 3D V-NAND structure.
Meanwhile, Dr Hyuk Jae Lee teaches at Seoul National University, specialising in embedded systems, computer architecture, and parallel processing. He is an alumnus of the same university and earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in 1996.
Dr Lee has previously held positions as an Assistant Professor at Louisiana Tech University and as a Senior Design Engineer at Intel Corporation, where he worked in the Server and Workstation Chipset Division.
By nominating two senior chip executives and an academic in the semiconductor field, Samsung highlighted its aim to bolster its strategic focus on semiconductors at the highest level.
The company has lately been under pressure to regain its competitive edge in the chip market after losing its lead in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, essential for Nvidia’s AI graphics processing units (GPUs), to its domestic rival SK Hynix.
The proposed board appointments will be put to a vote at the company’s shareholders’ meeting, scheduled for March 19.
