Capping off a busy week for fab-related information, South Korea authorities this week gave SK Hynix a inexperienced gentle to construct a brand new, 120 trillion gained ($106.35 billion) fab advanced. The fab cluster will likely be primarily used to construct DRAM for PCs, cell units, and servers, utilizing course of applied sciences that depend on excessive ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The first fab within the advanced will go browsing in 2025.
The new cluster will home 4 large semiconductor fabrication vegetation, which will likely be positioned on a 4.15 million square-meter website, stories The Korea Herald. The 4 fabs may have a deliberate capability of round 800,000 wafer begins per 30 days (WSPM), which is able to make the location one of many world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing hubs. Keeping in thoughts that we’re coping with EUV fabs, it’s not shocking that a large 200,000-WSPM plant with EUV instruments will value SK Hynix north of $25 billion. The fab cluster will likely be positioned close to Yongin, South Korea, 50 kilometers south of Seoul, in accordance with Yonhap information company that cites the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.
The new fabs will likely be used to make varied varieties of DRAM utilizing SK Hynix’s upcoming manufacturing applied sciences that may use excessive ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. And with a begin date nonetheless years away, we’re possible taking a look at a fab that will likely be used to fabricate DDR5, LPDDR5X, and different future varieties of DRAM.
SK Hynix reportedly plans to start out development of the primary fab within the Yongin cluster within the fourth quarter of 2021. Given the anticipated measurement of the large constructing and the period of time wanted to folly load it with manufacturing gear, SK Hynix expects this primary fab to be accomplished in 2025.
It is important to notice that simply a number of years in the past SK Hynix and Samsung used to construct fabs that would produce each DRAM and NAND flash reminiscence – or not less than be transformed with a minimal quantity of effort. This just isn’t the case at this time as DRAM manufacturing now closely depends on lithography gear, whereas 3D NAND manufacturing makes use of a great deal of etching instruments, which is why the fabs for various kinds of reminiscence need to be geared up utterly in another way.
The fab cluster in Yongin will likely be SK Hynix’s second main DRAM website in South Korea after the corporate’s major DRAM hub close to Icheon that homes its M10, M14, and M16 fabs. The M16 fab was accomplished in February and will likely be used for DRAM manufacturing utilizing SK Hynix’s EUV-based 1a course of expertise beginning the second half of 2021.
