It seems someone has been giving Samsung executives a little too much red cordial – as they seem to moving in all directions at once and pushing out research projects and pumping money into new capital expenditure.

For example the company has developed a new solid-state drive (SSD), which is expected to replace hard disk drives in laptop computers.

The new SSD is about 8 cm long and 1 cm thick; and has been described as the world’s smallest. Samsung says it is 2.4 times faster than traditional hard drives and can read up to 200 megabytes of data per second and the company claims says it intends to begin production this year.

Samsung also noted that it is confident that 35 per cent of all of its notebook computers will use the SSD by 2012.
 
Also on the research and development front, Samsung, the world’s No. 2 mobile handset maker says it has developed a mobile phone model equipped with Infineon’s chipsets.

Furthermore the company said on Monday it plans to invest nearly AUD $ 1billion in upgrading memory lines this year.

This spending spree is all part of the South Korea-based company’s 2008 investment plan with about 64 per cent out of it earmarked for memory products such as dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and flash chips.

On a more somber note, Samsung said it expected to see its chip division turn a corner by the second half after a year-long downward spiral during which prices of some chips lost 90 per cent of their value.