The new line, or clean room will be built inside its 17th wafer fabrication facility building in the Hwasung cluster, which is now producing DRAM chips, sharing utilities and other supporting facilities.
Building and operating two clean rooms in one big mammoth building is typical of Samsung’s wafer fabrication facility design scheme, allowing the two clean rooms to share the same electricity and water treatment utilities as well as other pipelines for gas supplies and wastes.
Production is scheduled to start at a monthly capacity of 40,000 wafer by year-end.
The new investment is part of Samsung’s huge bet on 3D NAND flash memory chips, as demand for the vertically stacked 3D NAND flash memory chips is poised for explosive growth.
After years of struggling to stabilize its fabrication process for 3D NAND flash memory chips, Samsung has reached what’s called golden yield, making more than 90% of its 3D NAND chip production sellable. The gain in the yield –the ration of marketable versus total production- allows the chip maker to cut production costs.
The cost cut is well timed with the arrival of the boom cycle which is in the offing, as data centers are mushrooming around the world to accommodate explosions of data, fueling demand boom for 3D NAND memory chip and other DRAM chips.
Data center servers are expected to outgrow PCs as the largest application market for DRAM and 3D NAND flash memory chips, as that’s where tons of data are stored and processed.
For example, the adoption of SSDs, or solid state drives –concentrations of NAND flash memory chips on a circuit board- into data center serve market is speeding up, replacing traditional HDDs as a main data storage system in high volume.
SSDs are also widely being used with PCs and smart phones, displacing HDDs.
SSDs outmaneuver HDDs in the data writing and reading speed and form factor, but are still charging price premiums over HDDs. Sacking up more of transistor cells vertically layer over layer into a given space of silicon footprint, the 3D NAND flash memory chip cut a path to reducing costs, opening wider the door to HDD displacement. 3D NAND flash memory chip-based SSDs are still more expensive than HDDs, but the gap has been narrowed to be negligible enough to pay extra for better performances.
To tap into the possible demand boom, Samsung is also gearing up to build one more 3D NAND flash memory chip facility at its Pyeongtaek wafer fabrication cluster of which construction is now under way.
Samsung is now operating two 3D NAND flash memory chip fabrication lines –one in Hwasung, Korea and the other in Xian, China.