Posted on 03/20/2023 4:09:41 AM PDT by FarCenter
Samsung Electronics has announced plans to build five new semiconductor factories south of Seoul over the next 20 years in a bid to close the gap with Taiwan’s TSMC in the integrated circuit (IC) foundry business while maintaining its leading position in memory chips.
The factories will be the core of what the South Korean government hopes will become “the world’s largest high-tech system semiconductor cluster.” Total investment in the scheme is expected to reach 300 trillion won (US$230 billion).
That might sound like a lot of money, but Samsung’s semiconductor capital spending was 47.9 trillion won last year, so the target is likely achievable.
Inspired by the Hsinchu Science Park in Taiwan, home of TSMC, Samsung’s cluster is expected to attract several chip design companies and suppliers of equipment, components, materials and related services to fill out the supply chain.
A Korean version of IMEC, the international semiconductor and nanoelectronics R&D center headquartered in Belgium, is also planned.
South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy says, “The mega cluster will be the key base of our semiconductor ecosystem.” It will be supported by tax incentives, research subsidies and infrastructure provided by the government.
Samsung Electronics is the world’s largest semiconductor vendor, with sales of $65.6 billion and 10.9% of the global market in 2022, according to market research organization Gartner. America’s Intel ranked second with 9.7% and South Korea’s SK hynix third with 6.0%.
Samsung is the market leader in both DRAM and NAND flash memory chips, but it ranks a distant second in the IC foundry market with a market share of only 13% compared with 60% for TSMC as of the fourth quarter of 2022, according to Counterpoint Research.
That could change, however. The battle between Samsung and TSMC has now shifted to the newly-introduced 3 nanometer (nm) node, with 2nm and 1.4nm coming over the next five years and Intel hoping to catch up.
In the context of intensifying competition between subsidized national semiconductor industries in Asia, Europe and America, China’s claim to Taiwan and the US government’s efforts to isolate China, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol stated that “…the government and companies should join forces to foster high-tech industries such as semiconductors as … national security assets.”
Samsung’s announcement came only a week after the South Korean government expressed its displeasure with the “unusual” conditions attached by the Biden administration to the CHIPS Act, which offers a total of $52.7 billion in subsidies and $24 billion in tax credits to companies that invest in semiconductor production and R&D in the US.
That’s a buttload of won.
Chip fabs are the most automated industry in the world.
If the USA cannot figure out how to run wafer and chip fabs at a profit, we might as well give up on manufacturing anything.
Yes, I know that chips and wafers have a lot of environmental issues, so just focus a lot of money and brain power on those issues and solve them.
Getting their chips out of Taiwan before China takes it.
What we gonna do when China takes Korea back?
Back? When was Korea ruled by China?
Until the takeover by Japan in the early 1900s, Korea was mostly independent of China. So long as they didn’t aggravate China and were reasonably subservient, the Koreans were too much bother to conquer. The Manchus and the Japanese had tried.
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