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| Samsung Electronics' chip making plant in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics |
By Baek Byung-yeul
With the competition for chip refinement processes reaching a breaking point, market competition between memory chip king Samsung Electronics and U.S. chipmaker Micron seems to be heating up over how small they can make their DRAM memory chips.
During a conference call for first-quarter earnings held April 26, a Samsung Electronics executive unveiled details about the production schedule of its 10-nanometer-level DRAM memory chip.
"We are already using EUV, partially in the D1z process, but we will be starting EUV application for production starting from the D1a DRAM, which is the lower side of the 14-nano, in order to establish and further our technology leadership," the executive vice president said during the meeting.
EUV refers to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology, which has been increasingly essential for chip makers as the technology enables production of smaller chips by scaling down complex patterns on wafers.
Industry officials said there is no problem for the Samsung executive vice president to mention ramping up the EUV lithography technology in its memory chip manufacturing, given other companies are also ramping up their efforts to introduce the latest technology.
But they said the Samsung executive's comment on mentioning the specific size of its DRAM memory ― 14-nanometer ― was considered very unusual, as memory chip makers have refrained from making official comments on their product details, since the competition for manufacturing smaller DRAM memory chips came down to the 10-nanometer level in 2016.
Given the most important thing for semiconductors is how many chips are made from a single wafer, Samsung wanted to provide more precise information about its products to investors and express its confidence that the company is still capable of leading the memory chip industry, they added.
"The remark from the Samsung official can be interpreted that Samsung Electronics is feeling a sense of crisis and decided to express its confidence in response to narrowing down the technology gap between itself and its followers," an official in the local chip industry said.
The official added the remark was also aimed at No. 3 memory chip maker Micron. In January, the U.S.-based memory chip maker announced that it succeeded to develop and mass-produce fourth-generation 10-nanometer ― also known as 1a ― DRAM memory chips for the first time in the industry.
Since the announcement, the industry's view was that Micron surpassed Samsung Electronics in terms of technological capability, which led the Samsung executive to officially announce the Korean chip giant will start mass-producing 14-nanometer DRAM chips in the second half of this year.
"Micron's announcement in January of mass production of the fourth-generation DRAM chips astonished the chip industry. Some say the announcement might have been exaggerated, but Micron is not far behind. Their earnings record tells us. Some may say they could generate such good performance by selling their chips at lower cost but this figure can only result from it possessing technological capability," the official said. In the first quarter, Micron generated $6.24 billion in sales and $1.26 billion in operating profit, thanks to soaring chip demand.
In addition to promoting its capability in the DRAM chip sector, Samsung is also promoting its chip packaging technology for high-performance products.
The Korean company said Thursday that it has developed a next-generation 2.5D packaging technology called Interposer-Cube4 (I-Cube4), which is expected to be used in high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI), fifth-generation (5G) network, cloud computing and data centers.
