As President Yoon pointed out, although South Korea has a leading position in the production of memory chips, OLED displays and batteries, the country lacks competitiveness in the field of system chips (semiconductors ), where ROK is only 2-3% of the global market.
The system semiconductors that the Yongin cluster will specialize in are widely used in fields such as artificial intelligence, supercomputing, robotics, autonomous driving, Internet of Things, etc. According to Omdia, the system semiconductor market will reach $477.3 billion by 2025, more than double the memory chip segment currently dominated by South Korean companies Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. In this regard, the new production cluster, which will be the largest in the world for its niche, is designed to solve the problem of South Korea’s comparative backlog in the field of system chips. The complex will be built by Samsung Electronics Corporation.
According to the published details of this giant financial project, the new complex will cover an area of about 7.1 million square meters. Until 2042, five major system semiconductor production plants will be built in this area. It is expected to involve up to 150 Korean and foreign enterprises dealing with raw materials, materials and components, equipment, and microcircuit design and design as partners in the new complex. This will create an ecosystem of the semiconductor industry, in which its different areas will be organically connected – design, production, packaging/assembly, testing, etc. This will create 1 million 600,000 new jobs. The total investment scale is about 300 trillion won, or about $230 billion.
Yoon Seok-yeol said Korea plans to form a giant semiconductor mega-cluster of manufacturing facilities in the Kiheung, Hwaseong, Pyeongtaek, Icheon, Yongin and Phangyo belts not far from the capital in the Gyeonggi Province. According to the Koreans’ plan, this mega-cluster should surpass its main competitors in terms of scale – Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park, where hundreds of companies work, and American manufacturing clusters in Texas.
