The construction of a Samsung chip lab in Japan has been announced
Nikkei has heard that Samsung Electronics plans to construct a research and development facility in Yokohama. This is a highly symbolic move that is anticipated to encourage cooperation between the Japanese and South Korean chip industries.
With an estimated price tag of over 30 billion yen ($222 million), the new Samsung R&D Institute Japan building will be constructed in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo. A standalone department will handle development.
The investment strategy will make use of the complementary skillsets of Japan and South Korea. Memory chips made by Samsung are the most widely used, and Japan is a leading supplier of both wafers and chipmaking equipment.
There is a lack of information other than the fact that the corporation would construct a production line for a prototype chip gadget.
The target launch date for the new plant is 2025, and it will employ several hundred employees. Samsung hopes to make use of the semiconductor investment subsidies provided by the Japanese government. More than 10 billion yen will likely be spent on subsidies.
Samsung said they couldn’t comment.
This action by South Korea’s most valuable corporation has the potential to increase cooperation between the two countries’ chip industries.
A newfound friendship between South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has paved the way for this investment. On the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima next week, the two heads of state are set to meet. Yoon visited Tokyo in March, and Kishida is currently in Seoul in retaliation.
In 2021, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung’s main rival, invested heavily in Japan in response to growing concerns over the island nation’s monopoly on chip production. Tsukuba, located to the north of Tokyo, is home to TSMC’s R&D lab.
Once a world leader in memory chip production, Japan is now striving to attract foreign investment in order to rebuild its manufacturing base. The Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Micron Technology, Inc. (Micron) are two of the largest foreign investors in Japan.
The new building will be used mostly for the “back end” of semiconductor manufacturing. The front-end process in chip manufacture involves the fabrication of electric circuits on a wafer, while the back-end process involves the final packaging of the wafer.
To achieve unprecedented levels of downsizing in electrical circuitry, R&D has typically been concentrated at the beginning of the manufacturing process. A lot of people think we’ve reached the limit of shrinking, and now we’ll have to work on enhancing back-end processes like wafer stacking to produce 3D circuits.
Samsung, it seems, thinks it has to collaborate more closely with Japanese manufacturers of materials and equipment in order to accomplish a breakthrough in the manufacturing process.