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Nanya Technology (2408), a DRAM giant under the Formosa Plastics Group, has invested NT$300 billion to build a new 12-inch plant, and has confirmed that the groundbreaking ceremony will be held on June 23. This is the Formosa Plastics Group's largest investment in the technology field in the past decade, and it is also an important step to seize the next-generation AI, 5G, server and metaverse business opportunities in the future.
Nanya Technology has sent invitations to suppliers and the media for the groundbreaking ceremony. The ceremony was personally presided over by Formosa Plastics Group President Wang Wenyuan, highlighting the group's attention to this matter.
Formosa Plastics Group has a wide range of semiconductor businesses. In addition to Nanya, there are also upstream silicon wafer manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor, substrate manufacturer Nanya, and back-end packaging and testing manufacturer Formosa Plastics, which have brought into play the synergy of upstream and downstream vertical integration. Nanya has a global memory market share of about 3%, and its scale is 1/16 of the leading Samsung. In the situation where Korean manufacturers dominate, Nanya focuses on niche memory and develops its own technology.
According to Nanya Technology's plan, the new 12-inch plant will be located in Taishan Nanlin Science Park in New Taipei City, with a total investment of up to NT$300 billion. The goal is to start mass production in 2025, using 10nm process technology to produce DRAM, with a monthly production capacity of approximately 45,000 pieces, representing the Formosa Plastics Group's official move towards independent DRAM technology.
Nanya Technology has actively invested in independent technology research and development, and developed a new 10-nanometer DRAM memory technology in early 2020. At the same time, it has confirmed that the next-generation 10-nanometer DRAM will use independently developed technology and will no longer adopt a licensing model.
The industry emphasizes that the beginning of DRAM technology independence is not only an important milestone for Nanya Technology, but also another peak in the semiconductor layout of Formosa Plastics Group. Nanya Technology General Manager Wu Jiazhao once said that DRAM is a key component for all electronic products to be intelligent and is an extremely important part of the semiconductor industry. Therefore, investing in the construction of advanced wafer fabs has made Nanya Technology not only a DRAM leader in Taiwan, but also a key global memory supplier.
The highly monopolized DRAM market, with the three largest suppliers in the United States and South Korea supplying 94%
According to icinsights, over the past 30 years, the DRAM market has been characterized by periods of astonishing growth and years of devastating collapse (Figure 1). In recent years, the DRAM market fell 37% in 2019, but soared 42% in 2021. Affected by a variety of reasons such as boom-bust cycles, the market has reduced the number of major DRAM suppliers from 20 in the mid-1990s to only 6 today.
Among them, the three major suppliers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, together accounted for 94% of the DRAM market share in 2021 (Figure 2). Last year, Samsung and SK Hynix, headquartered in South Korea, accounted for 71.3% of global DRAM sales.
With a 44% market share, Samsung remained the world's largest DRAM supplier in 2021, with sales of nearly $41.9 billion. Samsung advanced its DRAM business on multiple fronts last year. After pioneering the use of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in March 2020, Samsung began mass production of EUV-based 14nm DRAM in October 2021. In the process, Samsung increased the number of EUV layers on its most advanced 14nm DDR5 DRAM process from two to five layers.
In November 2021, Samsung said it had applied its EUV technology to develop 14nm 16Gb low-power double data rate 5X (LPDDR5X) DRAM specifically for high-speed application big data end uses such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), etc. The company claims that the LPDDR5X DRAM offers data processing speeds of up to 8.5Gbps (1.3 times faster than existing 6.4Gbps LPDDR5 devices) and that it consumes about 20% less power than LPDDR5 memory.
The company also introduced its first DRAM memory modules supporting the new Compute Express Link (CXL) interconnect standard and launched 2GB GDDR6 and 2GB DDR4 automotive DRAM designed for autonomous electric vehicles and high-performance infotainment systems.
Ranking second and accounting for 28% of the DRAM market share in 2021 is SK Hynix, whose DRAM sales increased by 39% to US$26.6 billion. DRAM accounted for about 71% of the company's total semiconductor sales in 2021. Its total DRAM sales are divided into: server DRAM, 40%; mobile DRAM, 35%; 15% from PC DRAM; consumer and graphics DRAM each accounted for 5%.
In 2021, SK Hynix released what it said was the industry's highest-performing DDR5 DRAM, with data speeds capable of transferring 163 full-HD movies per second. The chip is called HBM3 because it is Hynix's third generation of high-bandwidth memory.
Like Samsung, SK Hynix has also started mass production of 8Gb LPDDR4 DRAM using EUV lithography technology, based on its fourth-generation 10nm-class process, called 1-alpha (1a nm) process.
Micron was the third-largest DRAM supplier in 2021 with sales of $21.9 billion. Micron's DRAM sales grew 41% and accounted for 23% of the global market share. Overall, DRAM accounted for approximately 73% of Micron's total calendar year IC sales of $30 billion.
In 2021, Micron introduced its 1a nm memory node, which is designed in part to support the data center's transition to DDR5 DRAM, driven by new CPU platforms that are expected to start ramping later this year and gain momentum in 2023. Micron's 1a nm DRAM is also used in low-power communications applications, including 5G smartphones.
Micron manufactures its 1a nm DRAM using a technology that does not require EUV lithography. However, the company has already ordered EUV equipment and plans to transition to EUV technology to manufacture its DRAM starting in 2024 using its 1-gamma (1g) nm node.
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