Samsung Electronics is opening an advanced semiconductor packaging research and development (R&D) hub in Yokohama, Japan, and expanding technological cooperation with local materials, components, and equipment corporations. It plans to invest 40 billion yen (about 350 billion won) over five years starting in 2024 and increase research staff to more than 100 by 2027.
According to the industry on the 9th, Samsung Electronics held an opening ceremony the previous day for the Advanced Package Lab (APL) in Minato Mirai, Yokohama, Japan. About 100 people attended the event, including Vice Chairman Jun Young-hyun of the Samsung Electronics device solutions (DS) institutional sector, and officials from the Japanese government, local governments, and partner companies.
Advanced packaging is a back-end process technology that links multiple semiconductors such as graphics processing units (GPU) and high bandwidth memory (HBM) into a single package. As simply shrinking semiconductor circuits has hit limits in improving performance and power efficiency, it is growing in importance as a key technology that determines the performance of semiconductors for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC).
Samsung Electronics will use APL as a global R&D hub for developing next-generation packaging technologies. It plans to expand joint research with local semiconductor materials and equipment companies, universities, and research institutes, and to develop and validate materials and process technologies needed for next-generation packaging.
Semiconductor materials and equipment corporations, as well as universities and research institutes, are concentrated near Yokohama. Samsung Electronics aims to combine Japan's strengths in materials and equipment technologies with its own semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities to accelerate the development and commercialization of advanced packaging technologies.
Samsung Electronics will also expand research staff, securing more than 100 people at APL by 2027. It will foster APL as a research cooperation hub consolidating Samsung Electronics and Japan's semiconductor ecosystems, and apply the technologies secured here to memory and logic semiconductors. Through this, Samsung Electronics plans to strengthen its advanced packaging competitiveness for AI accelerators and semiconductors for HPC.