SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won gives a greeting at the M16 completion ceremony held at SK Hynix headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do on the 1st. (Photo = SK Hynix)
After the start of construction, the construction cost alone is 3.5 trillion won (excluding equipment purchase costs). The building area is 57,000m2, the size of 8 soccer fields. The length is 336m and the width is 163m, and the apartment is 37 stories tall. Since construction commenced in November 2018, it is SK Hynix’s largest semiconductor advance base at home and abroad, completed in 25 months with an annual input of 3.34 million people. This is the appearance of SK Hynix’s state-of-the-art semiconductor factory’M16′, which showed its grandeur with the completion ceremony in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do on the 1st. SK Hynix is planning to start producing next-generation DRAM semiconductors here. In particular, for the first time in the M16, SK Hynix introduced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) exposure equipment, which is the core technology of semiconductor microprocessing. From the second half of this year, SK Hynix plans to mass-produce ‘4th generation 10-nano class (1a) DRAM’ at the M16 plant.
The EUV process uses an extreme ultraviolet light source in the semiconductor photo process, and its wavelength is less than one-tenth shorter than that of the conventional argon fluoride (ArF) light source, so it is advantageous when implementing semiconductor microcircuit patterns and provides performance and productivity. You can increase it. Earlier, at the end of last year, Micron of the US announced that it succeeded in producing the 4th generation 10-nano-class DRAM. However, Micron is known to have introduced the existing argon fluoride process, not the EUV process. SK hynix plans to grow this plant as a next-generation growth engine based on state-of-the-art infrastructure.
The operation of SK Hynix’s M16 plant is expected to intensify competition for the production of next-generation DRAMs using microprocessing in the memory semiconductor industry. Samsung Electronics finished customer evaluation by applying EUV process to the first generation 10-nano class (1x) DDR4 in March last year, and plans to mass-produce EUV equipment from DDR5, a next-generation DRAM to be introduced in the second half of this year, and LPDDR5 for mobile.
SK Chairman Choi Tae-won said at the completion ceremony that day, “two years ago, when the semiconductor economy was on a downtrend, when we said that we were building the M16, there was a lot of concern.” It made me dream of this bigger future.”
Kim Dong-wook reporter [email protected]
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