Samsung’s Exynos and ISOCELL development could be entering a new phase, as the Korean manufacturer expands its use of artificial intelligence across chip design and semiconductor engineering. The company is reportedly seeing substantial productivity gains from integrating AI tools into processes that previously demanded weeks of manual work.
The shift centres on Samsung’s System LSI division, the arm responsible for chip design. It has begun applying Anthropic’s Claude Code AI tool to actual semiconductor development, using it for design and testing tasks. According to reports, Samsung has recorded productivity improvements of between 15x and 30x on certain specific tasks.
How AI is reshaping chip development
These figures do not mean that Samsung can manufacture an entire Exynos chipset 15 to 30 times faster overall. Instead, particular engineering tasks within the far larger chip-development pipeline can now be handled in a fraction of the time previously required.
One example involved testing a new chip whose components were still partly under development. Ordinarily, engineers would wait for the missing pieces to be finished before running full tests. Using an AI model, Samsung created software versions of the unfinished hardware, effectively producing temporary stand-ins. Engineers could then assess how the different parts of the chip worked together without waiting for the real components. Work expected to take more than a month was completed in roughly two days.
Faster testing and driver development
A second case saw a Samsung engineer needing to build virtual USB keyboard and mouse models for testing. Rather than spending weeks learning the technical details, studying existing code and constructing everything by hand, the engineer turned to AI. The task was reportedly finished in a single day, and the results were later applied to Android USB driver development.
The wider implication is a streamlining of Samsung’s semiconductor workflow. By compressing engineering steps that once stretched across weeks, the company can move designs from concept to testing far more quickly. This applies both to its Exynos processors and its ISOCELL camera sensors, two component families that feature across the Galaxy phone and tablet range.
For consumers, the immediate benefit is less clear. Faster and more efficient design processes could, in principle, ease cost pressures on Exynos-equipped and ISOCELL-equipped Galaxy devices, though the most realistic outcome would be price stability rather than reductions. Samsung’s System LSI division is now using Claude Code for live chip design and testing.
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Image: phonearena.com
