In South Korea, the semiconductor industry has continued to grow since the 1980s due to the heavy use of semiconductors in computers and other devices. South Korea held a 17.7 percent share in the global semiconductor market in 2022, and continued to be the second largest in the world for the 10th consecutive year since 2013. [1]
The country accounted for 60.5% of the global memory semiconductor market, with a DRAM market share of 70.5% and a NAND market share of 52.6%. South Korea is continuously focusing on R&D and investment to maintain its competitive advantage. In addition, South Korea is pushing to expand its foundry market share based on ultra-fine processing technology. The country accounts for 17.3% of the global foundry market. [1]
The history of Korea's semiconductor industry began in 1965. [5]
The South Korean government announced in January 2024 its plan to invest about $470 billion over the next 23 years to build the world's largest semiconductor cluster in a large production complex to be built in Gyeonggi Province, along with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. South Korea aims to increase the self-sufficiency ratio of essential materials, parts, and equipment for chip production to 50 percent by 2030. [6] [7]
"If we complete the construction of the semiconductor mega cluster at an earlier date, we will achieve the world's leading competitiveness in the chip sector and provide quality jobs for young generations."
"We already possess world-class technological and production capabilities in several areas, such as memory chips and OLED displays. The government must firmly support the private sector's investment for further growth."
In March 2024, the Statistics Korea released statistical data related to semiconductor production in February of the same year. Compared to the same month last year, production increased 65.3%, the largest increase since the end of 2009. [8]
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use the same cell design, consisting of floating gate MOSFETs. They differ at the circuit level depending on whether the state of the bit line or word lines is pulled high or low: in NAND flash, the relationship between the bit line and the word lines resembles a NAND gate; in NOR flash, it resembles a NOR gate.
Rambus Inc. is an American technology company that designs, develops and licenses chip interface technologies and architectures that are used in digital electronics products. The company, founded in 1990, is well known for inventing RDRAM and for its intellectual property-based litigation following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.
The semiconductor industry is the aggregate of companies engaged in the design and fabrication of semiconductors and semiconductor devices, such as transistors and integrated circuits. It formed around 1960, once the fabrication of semiconductor devices became a viable business. The industry's annual semiconductor sales revenue has since grown to over $481 billion, as of 2018.
The foundry model is a microelectronics engineering and manufacturing business model consisting of a semiconductor fabrication plant, or foundry, and an integrated circuit design operation, each belonging to separate companies or subsidiaries.
SK Group is a South Korean multinational manufacturing and services conglomerate headquartered in Seoul. A chaebol, SK Group is second largest such conglomerate by revenue in South Korea, after Samsung Group. Through a number of subsidiaries, it is engaged in various businesses, including manufacture of chemicals and petrochemicals, semiconductors, flash memory and miscellaneous information technology, as well providing telecommunications services worldwide among its other less notable ventures.
A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the channel, forming a double or even multi gate structure. These devices have been given the generic name "FinFETs" because the source/drain region forms fins on the silicon surface. The FinFET devices have significantly faster switching times and higher current density than planar CMOS technology.
SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. Hynix is the world's second-largest memory chipmaker and the world's sixth-largest semiconductor company. Founded as Hyundai Electronic Industrial Co., Ltd. in 1983 and known as Hyundai Electronics, the company has manufacturing sites in Korea, the United States, mainland China and Taiwan. In 2012, when SK Telecom became its major shareholder, Hynix merged with SK Group.
GDDR4 SDRAM, an abbreviation for Graphics Double Data Rate 4 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory, is a type of graphics card memory (SGRAM) specified by the JEDEC Semiconductor Memory Standard. It is a rival medium to Rambus's XDR DRAM. GDDR4 is based on DDR3 SDRAM technology and was intended to replace the DDR2-based GDDR3, but it ended up being replaced by GDDR5 within a year.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is transistor density.
The "14 nanometer process" refers to a marketing term for the MOSFET technology node that is the successor to the "22 nm" node. The "14 nm" was so named by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Until about 2011, the node following "22 nm" was expected to be "16 nm". All "14 nm" nodes use FinFET technology, a type of multi-gate MOSFET technology that is a non-planar evolution of planar silicon CMOS technology.
In electronics, a multi-level cell (MLC) is a memory cell capable of storing more than a single bit of information, compared to a single-level cell (SLC), which can store only one bit per memory cell. A memory cell typically consists of a single floating-gate MOSFET, thus multi-level cells reduce the number of MOSFETs required to store the same amount of data as single-level cells.
In semiconductor fabrication, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) defines the "10 nanometer process" as the MOSFET technology node following the "14 nm" node.
Netlist Inc. is a Delaware-registered corporation headquartered in Irvine, California that designs and sells high-performance SSDs and modular memory subsystems to enterprise customers in diverse industries. It also manufactures a line of specialty and legacy memory products to storage customers, appliance customers, system builders and cloud and datacenter customers. Netlist holds a portfolio of patents in the areas of server memory, hybrid memory, storage class memory, rank multiplication and load reduction. Netlist has more than 120 employees and an annual revenue of US$142.4 million as of 2021 The stock was added to NASDAQ in late 2006. In the initial public offering of its common stock in 2006, Netlist sold 6,250,000 shares at $7.00 each. On September 26, 2018, Netlist announced they were moving from NASDAQ and currently trades on the OTCQB.
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators, network devices, high-performance datacenter AI ASICs, as on-package cache in CPUs and on-package RAM in upcoming CPUs, and FPGAs and in some supercomputers. The first HBM memory chip was produced by SK Hynix in 2013, and the first devices to use HBM were the AMD Fiji GPUs in 2015.
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a South Korean multinational major appliance and consumer electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is currently the pinnacle of the Samsung chaebol, accounting for 70% of the group's revenue in 2012.
Graphics Double Data Rate 6 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory is a type of synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high bandwidth, "double data rate" interface, designed for use in graphics cards, game consoles, and high-performance computing. It is a type of GDDR SDRAM, and is the successor to GDDR5. Just like GDDR5X it uses QDR in reference to the write command clock (WCK) and ODR in reference to the command clock (CK).
The Chinese semiconductor industry, including integrated circuit design and manufacturing, forms a major part of mainland China's information technology industry.
South Korea's major export industries include semiconductors, automobiles, and shipbuilding. Other major industries in South Korea are electronics, telecommunications, chemicals, and steel.
