SK hynix will invest 19 trillion won to build an advanced packaging fab (plant) in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province. The company said it was a "strategic decision made in sympathy with the purpose of the government's regional balanced growth policy, while comprehensively considering supply chain efficiency and future competitiveness."
SK hynix on the 13th posted an article on its newsroom titled "Explanation regarding new investment in advanced packaging P&T (package & test)" and stated accordingly. P&T refers to facilities that complete semiconductor chips produced at front-end fabs into product form and conduct final quality verification. The front-end refers to the step in the memory semiconductor manufacturing process where circuits are formed on a wafer to implement memory cells and devices.
As competition in artificial intelligence (AI) services accelerates, demand for related memory products is also surging. In the case of high bandwidth memory (HBM), it is expected to show an average annual growth rate of 33% from last year to 2030. SK hynix said it will carry out this investment to respond stably to global AI memory demand amid these environmental changes and in consideration of production optimization at the Cheongju fab. "In advanced packaging processes, proximity is extremely important in terms of linkage with the front-end as well as logistics and operational stability, and given these conditions, the Cheongju fab was selected as the optimal location."
Cheongju already has the M11, M12 and M15 fabs producing NAND and the P&T3 handling back-end operations in operation. In addition, M15X, which was decided to be built with a total investment of 20 trillion won to secure next-generation DRAM production capacity such as HBM in 2024, is also in place. M15X opened its clean room in Oct. ahead of the original schedule last year and is now in a countdown to operation, sequentially setting up equipment.
The back-end is the stage of completing finished chips into products usable in the real world by dicing, packaging and testing, and is divided into packaging and testing. At the P&T7 facility, an advanced packaging process belonging to the back-end will be carried out. This process is a core technology that determines performance and power efficiency in manufacturing AI memory such as HBM, and its importance has grown rapidly in recent years. With this investment, SK hynix secured three advanced packaging bases in total: Icheon in the Seoul metropolitan area, Cheongju outside the metropolitan area, and the production base in West Lafayette, Indiana, in the United States.
P&T7, with a total scale of 19 trillion won, is planned to be built on a 70,000-pyeong (about 230,000 square meters) site within the Cheongju Technopolis industrial complex. Construction will begin in Apr. this year with completion targeted for the end of 2027. With this investment, the SK hynix Cheongju campus completed the system of an integrated semiconductor cluster encompassing production of NAND flash, HBM and DRAM, as well as advanced packaging.
SK hynix plans to strengthen its AI memory competitiveness over the long term through organic linkage among fabs. It also aims to respond preemptively to increasing HBM demand. In particular, P&T7 is expected to play a major role in the process of commercializing DRAM produced at the M15X front-end fab into HBM.
An SK hynix official said, "Through the Cheongju P&T7 investment, we aim to contribute to strengthening the national industrial base over the mid-to-long term beyond short-term efficiency or gains and losses, and to creating a structure in which the Seoul metropolitan area and the provinces grow together," and "We hope that government policies and the efforts of corporations will together lead to results that strengthen national competitiveness."