Summary: On November 9th, according to South Korean media BusinessKorea, SK Hynix (SK Hynix) is expanding its foundry business layout in China following the announcement of the acquisition of Intel’s NAND flash memory business and Dalian plant in October this year.
News on November 9, according to South Korean media BusinessKorea, following the announcement of the acquisition of Intel’s NAND flash memory business and Dalian plant in October this year, SK Hynix (SK Hynix) is expanding its foundry business layout in China.
BusinessKorea reported that SK Hynix System IC, a subsidiary of SK Hynix specializing in foundry business, sold 1,206 pieces of it at the M8 plant in Cheongju, Chungcheongbuk-do, for 194.2 billion won (approximately RMB 1.15 billion). The semiconductor production equipment was sold to a joint venture of the group in Wuxi, China, with a view to further expanding its foundry business in China. According to
data, the predecessor of SK Hynix System IC is the foundry business unit established by SK Hynix in 2010. In 2017, SK Hynix formally established its independent subsidiary SK Hynix System IC after formally splitting its foundry business. Its purpose is to further strengthen the competitiveness of the foundry business. At the same time, SK Hynix also hopes to use foundry Business, make full use of its production lines, reduce operating costs, and make it a new growth engine outside of the storage business.
At that time, the SK Hynix System IC Cheongju M8 plant, which was independent from SK Hynix, had a capacity of 100,000 8-inch wafers, and its main products were display panel driver ICs, power management ICs and CMOS image sensors. The largest customer of the M8 factory is LG, which produces LCD driver ICs for LG. In addition, M8 also manufactures power management chips for South Korea’s Silicon Works and Silicon Mitus, and produces CMOS image sensors for SK Hynix.
In order to further develop the foundry market in China, in July 2018, SK Hynix announced that its foundry subsidiary SK hynix System IC will establish an 8-inch wafer foundry in Wuxi, mainly for the production of analog ICs. Immediately afterwards, in August 2018, South Korea’s SK Hynix System IC company established a wholly-owned SK Hynix System Integrated Circuit (Wuxi) Co., Ltd. in Xinwu District, Wuxi, covering an area of 180,000 square meters, and the first phase of the project investment was US$275 million. .
At the same time, SK Hynix System IC also established a joint venture company-Haichen Semiconductor (Wuxi) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Haichen Semiconductor") with Wuxi Industrial Development Group under the Wuxi State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, with a registered capital of US$366 million. The shareholding ratios of the two parties are 49.9% and 50.1% respectively.
It is understood that the joint venture will be the main operating body of the new 8-inch wafer foundry project, with a total investment of 1.4 billion US dollars, mainly engaged in CIS (camera circuit), DDI (drive circuit), PMIC (power management integrated circuit) and NAND memory and other foundry manufacturing and sales businesses, while also developing new foundry businesses such as logic and mixed-signal chips. Among them, SK Hynix System IC mainly provides tangible and intangible assets such as 8-inch wafer production equipment, while Wuxi Industrial Development Group, a subsidiary of Wuxi SASAC, provides necessary infrastructure such as workshops and water.
In February 2019, the new 8-inch wafer foundry main building of Haichen Semiconductor was officially topped off, and trial production began on March 16 this year.
According to the plan of the joint venture, SK Hynix will move the 8-inch wafer foundry production equipment of the M8 factory in Cheongju, South Korea, to the joint venture factory in Wuxi, China in batches before the end of 2021. It is estimated that 115,000 8-inch wafers will be produced every month after the full production in 2022, which is much higher than the average monthly production of 50,000 8-inch wafers at home and abroad.
Therefore, this time SK Hynix System IC sold more than 1,000 semiconductor production equipment at its M8 plant in Cheongju, Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea.The joint venture company Haichen Semiconductor is also part of the previous plan. At the same time, this also means that the joint venture plant is about to enter the mass production stage.
Although SK Hynix moved its 8-inch wafer foundry production line at its M8 factory in Cheongju, South Korea to Wuxi, it should be pointed out that the core R&D of its 8-inch wafer foundry will remain in South Korea. In addition, South Korea still retains 12-inch wafer foundries, which are mainly used to produce high value-added products such as CMOS image sensors.
Therefore, Haichen Semiconductor, a joint venture between SK Hynix System IC and Wuxi SASAC, has not actually brought much core technology. Some analysts say that the 8-inch production line equipment of the SK Hynix System IC Cheongju M8 wafer foundry is relatively old, and it mainly targets analog ICs with low process requirements. Korean local customers are limited, and competitiveness and revenue have not been improved. Therefore, Only then decided to move the production line to mainland China.
In addition, Haichen Semiconductor’s total investment is 1.4 billion U.S. dollars (approximately RMB 9.279 billion). The nearly 9.3 billion investment has yielded an 8-inch crystal that does not have core R&D capabilities, uses old equipment, and mainly produces analog ICs. Is it worth it? In contrast, Gekewei’s newly-built 12-inch CIS integrated circuit characteristic process research and development and industrialization project in Shanghai, according to previous official reports, is estimated to have a total investment of 2.2 billion US dollars (approximately RMB 14.582 billion). According to the data disclosed in Gekewei's prospectus, the investment in the project is about 6.845 billion yuan.
Editor: Xinzhixun-Rurouni Sword
