According to a new report from The Elec, Samsung is planning to build pilot production lines at its semiconductor manufacturing plants in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, and Taylor, USA. In the semiconductor business, a pilot production line is built roughly three months before starting the main production line to set up the manufacturing process, test equipment, check for errors, run trial production, and things of that sort.
The pilot production line at the Pyeongtaek factory will be built at its P4 production line, where Samsung is expected to manufacture memory and logic chips. It means once the pilot production line at P4 is set up and tested, the company will then build the main production line at P4 and start mass-producing semiconductors on that line. The Pyeongtaek factory already has other functional semiconductor manufacturing lines.
There are, however, no details about the manufacturing line where Samsung is planning to set up the pilot production line at the Taylor chip factory. Maybe that’s because the semiconductor factory in Taylor is still under construction and there’s no manufacturing taking place there at the moment. The Taylor chip factory is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of 2024. However, the company is running behind schedule, and construction is said to kick off in H1 2023.
Samsung is expanding its semiconductor manufacturing capacity, but at the same time, the company is expecting the revenue from the chip business in 2023 to be half of that expected from the business last year. However, 2024 is when analysts predict the chip market to rise, and that’s when the company could get back its lost revenues. The South Korean firm is also expecting lower operating profit from the smartphone business in 2023 due to increasing component prices.
