Samsung breaks ground on $33 billion chip campus

LONDON — South Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. broke ground Thursday (Sept. 29) on a second round of construction at its Hwaseong semiconductor facility. The building is part of a $33 billion seven-year plan that calls for an R&D facility and eight fabrication lines to be built there by 2012, Samsung said.

The Hwaseong plant was first established in 2000, and the first phase of building included five fabrication lines and one R&D manufacturing line on 150 acres. The Hwaseong expansion will occupy 230 acres and is expected to create 14,000 jobs, Samsung said.

The expansion will house Samsung’s next-generation R&D production line — labeled NRD — which is due to begin operations in May 2006. The NRD line is designed as a double-tiered cleanroom with adjoining office space for R&D work on materials, nanometer-scale structures and manufacturing processes for both memory and logic ICs.

The total investment for the 300-mm diameter wafer R&D line is expected to total about $860 million, Samsung said, adding that it expects its total R&D workforce to add 5,000 engineers by 2012.

Samsung’s main semiconductor fabrication site, Giheung, was established in 1983. After installing 15 fabrication and R&D lines in Giheung, an expansion was initiated in nearby Hwaseong, giving the entire site the name Giheung-Hwaseong. When completed in 2012, Samsung’s Giheung-Hwaseong complex will be the world’s largest semiconductor fabrication facility, Samsung claimed.

The first fabrication line at Hwaseong — line 15 — is already under construction. The schedule calls for completion of the building shell by the first half of 2006. Of the eight fabrication lines planned for Hwaseong, Samsung expects four to be designed for larger manufacturing capacities than conventional lines on wafers with a diameter of 300 mm or larger.