Samsung breaks ground on 6 trillion won HBM4E packaging plant in Asan

Samsung Electronics held a November 12 groundbreaking ceremony for a dedicated high-bandwidth memory packaging plant at its Onyang campus in Asan, South Korea. In its progress report at the ceremony, Samsung identified the facility as Onyang Line 5 and named HBM4E, its next generation of stacked memory for AI accelerators, as the line’s main product. The ceremony came about four months after Samsung disclosed its regional investment plans in July.

South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources put construction spending at 6 trillion won. The government’s Policy Briefing site said Samsung plans to follow that with 40 trillion won in phased investment in advanced equipment, bringing the two amounts to 46 trillion won. The presentation at the ceremony put the new facility’s total floor area at around 31,000 square meters and showed that foundation work was underway. The progress graphic put construction at 4.9% when shown at the ceremony.

A dedicated memory line at an existing chip site

Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee described Onyang as a site where the company has assembled and tested chips to turn them into finished components. Samsung’s July announcement set out two projects for its memory business in the region. It plans to add HBM facilities in Onyang and expand and modernize equipment in nearby Cheonan to handle HBM. Line 5 is the facility now under construction in Asan.

Packaging is the stage of semiconductor production where individual chips are assembled and connected into parts a system can use. HBM places several DRAM dies in a vertical stack. Electrical connections through the silicon link the layers, and a wide interface lets the stack transfer large amounts of data in parallel, as Samsung’s semiconductor division explains. An AI accelerator uses that memory to feed data to its processors as they repeatedly read model parameters and store intermediate results during training or inference.

Samsung shipped HBM4E samples in May

Samsung said it started commercial shipments of HBM4 in February and announced on May 29 that it had sent samples of 12-layer HBM4E to global customers. At the time, the company said it would align volume production with customer schedules. In its October 29 results, Samsung said sales of commercial HBM4 had increased substantially during the third quarter. The Onyang presentation identifies a new line where Samsung plans to package its successor, HBM4E.

After construction, ramping up output requires installing the packaging equipment and checking that the assembled stacks meet operating requirements. Samsung’s product materials list a 16-layer HBM4E configuration with up to 64 GB of capacity. Samsung said in May that it had reused the DRAM and logic base-die manufacturing processes from its HBM4 in the HBM4E samples. The base die sits beneath the memory layers and links the stack to the accelerator. The Onyang presentation identified HBM4E as the primary product and gave the building’s size and construction progress. It did not specify output by configuration or delivery dates for individual customers.

At a meeting after the ceremony, the industry ministry outlined infrastructure support, including getting electricity and water to industrial projects on time. The presidential office said South Chungcheong Province had shortened permitting by handling procedures in parallel. The government’s Policy Briefing site reported that the province and the city of Asan cut permitting time to roughly a third of the usual length. Power and water have their own delivery schedules as a factory gets ready to run its equipment. The presidential office said the ministry had set up a task force to work with investors on problems at their sites.

The meeting also addressed how Samsung and suppliers plan to develop equipment and materials together. According to the presidential office, 194 Samsung suppliers plan to invest about 18.1 trillion won in South Korea by 2030, including in additional production facilities. The suppliers’ plan covers investments around the country, with a separate budget from the building and equipment planned for Samsung’s Onyang campus. At the same ceremony, Samsung Electro-Mechanics marked an expansion of its package substrate production in Sejong. A substrate supports chips and carries signals between them and the rest of the system. The Onyang project expands the capacity to assemble the memory itself.