Samsung held the tool-in ceremony for its new chip research and development facility in Giheung, South Korea. This is the same place where Samsung first began making semiconductor memory chips 50 years ago and made the world's first 64MB DRAM in 1992.
It plans to bring back the glory it recently lost in the memory chip segment from the same place.
Samsung plans to invest $14.4 billion in its chip research and development facility in Giheung, South Korea
At its new chip research facility in Giheung, Samsung expects to take a significant leap into the future. The company plans to develop future memory chips and other semiconductor design and manufacturing technologies at this facility.
This is a unified research and development facility where Samsung's foundry, memory, and System LSI divisions will continue their research and develop new technologies.
Samsung plans to invest around KRW $20 trillion ($14.4 billion) by 2030 in its new complex that covers an area of 109,000 square meters.
The tool-in ceremony is quite important in a semiconductor facility, as that is when the production equipment arrives. High NA extreme ultra-violet (EUV) lithography equipment and new material deposition equipment will be installed at the R&D facility.
Those tools will be used to develop 3D DRAM and NAND flash memory chips with more than 1,000 layers. Wafer bonding infrastructure will also be installed for things like wafer-to-wafer bonding.
The construction of this new facility started in 2022 and is now complete. Now that chip fabrication equipment has arrived, the process of setting up the equipment and testing it will start soon. The campus will include a dedicated line that will start the production in mid-2025.
About 100 guests from Samsung and other partner firms and customers were present at Samsung's tool-in ceremony.
Young Hyun Jun, Vice Chairman and Head of the Device Solutions Division at Samsung Electronics, said, “NRD-K will bolster our development speed, enabling the company to create a virtuous cycle to accelerate fundamental research on next-generation technology and mass production. We will lay the foundation for a new leap forward in Giheung, where Samsung Electronics' 50-year history of semiconductors began, and create a new future for the next 100 years.“
