An aerial view of the site for SK hynix's P&T7 plant in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province / Courtesy of SK hynix
SK hynix on Wednesday broke ground for its P&T7 plant in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, a new facility for packaging artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors into finished products and conducting final quality testing.
The groundbreaking ceremony was attended by SK hynix Chief Production Officer Lee Byung-gi and 125 employees, as well as officials from the fab’s builder, SK Ecoplant.
P&T7 is a fab dedicated to advanced packaging for manufacturing AI-specific memory chips such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM). The memory giant invested 19 trillion won ($12.88 billion) to build the facility in an industrial complex in the city, covering about 230,000 square meters.
The fab will house 150,000 square meters of clean rooms, including 60,000 square meters dedicated to wafer-level packaging lines and 90,000 square meters for wafer testing lines.
Wafer-level packaging is an advanced process that completes packaging at the wafer level, unlike conventional methods that first dice wafers into individual chips before packaging.
SK hynix plans to complete the wafer testing lines by October next year and the wafer-level packaging lines by February 2028.
Packaging and testing are categorized as back-end processes in semiconductor fabrication, which in the past focused on ensuring product reliability and completing packaging. However, they have become a key part of AI semiconductor production in recent years, as technologies such as wafer-level packaging have been developed to overcome the limits of fabrication technology.
Officials of SK hynix, SK Ecoplant and Cheongju city attend the groundbreaking ceremony of SK hynix's P&T7 plant in the North Chungcheong Province city, Wednesday. Courtesy of SK hynix
“P&T7 will serve as a key production base completing SK hynix’s AI memory leadership,” Lee said during the ceremony. “We will focus our manufacturing capabilities to ensure the advanced products produced here become a standard for global AI infrastructure.”
Source: Korea Times News
