Samsung has been working on an absolutely massive semiconductor factory in Pyeongtaek for some time now, and news broke today that the three-legged factory, the largest of its kind in the entire world, is set to be finished soon, and will begin full production in July. The huge factory is going to be Samsung’s flagship plant, and will reportedly be exclusively manufacturing a very advanced variety of Samsung’s signature NAND chips; fourth-generation 3D chips with 64 layers. Some parts of the gargantuan factory are already in production, but the factory is not yet at its full capacity, and as of right now, the full measure of the massive building is not quite done being built up and set up for production. Once it’s ready, analysts say that Samsung should have the capacity to produce up to 450,000 wafers of silicon each month, with about half of those being the aforementioned 3D NAND chips.
The 3D NAND chips in question are the fourth generation of Samsung’s flagship silicon, and bear a full 64 layers. The layers are stacked vertically with insulation between and linked, but still remain thin thanks to die reduction processes. This gives them 64 times the memory that normal, single-layer NAND chips would have on the same die space. These highly space-efficient NAND chips are also far more power-efficient than their single-layer cousins.
With the completion of this factory, Samsung will have a stranglehold on the silicon market in three of the most important areas. The newly finished Pyeongtaek fab outfit will give them dominance in the NAND field, a system semiconductor plant in Giheung gives them the edge there, and a high-capacity DRAM factory in Hwaseong helps them to enforce their continued dominance and innovation in that market. Samsung’s triad of chip businesses, along with their ability to manufacture displays, mobile chipsets and the like leaves them positioned to be one of the top tech companies of the decade worldwide, going into 2020. They plan on expanding their NAND and DRAM production on top of putting the newly finished NAND factory to its full good use, which means that they will manufacture more than enough parts to hold a majority in supplying semiconductor-based products, if they play their cards right.