SK Hynix to Invest 19 Trillion Won to Build Advanced Packaging Fab in Cheongju

SK Hynix announced on Jan. 13 that it has decided to make a new investment in the advanced packaging fab P&T7 to stably respond to global artificial intelligence (AI) memory demand and optimize production at the Cheongju fab.”

P&T7 is scheduled to be built on a 70,000-pyeong site within the Cheongju Technopolis Industrial Complex. Construction will commence in April this year with the goal of completion by the end of next year. The total investment amount is 19 trillion won. SK Hynix had previously demolished buildings on the former LG Plant 2 site in Cheongju that it had purchased in the past to build the P&T7 facility. Subsequently, it finalized the construction timing and investment scale to respond to the semiconductor supercycle (boom) market conditions.

P&T7 is an advanced packaging fab that completes semiconductor chips produced in front-end fabs into product form and conducts final quality verification. Once P&T7 is completed, the company will secure a total of three advanced packaging hubs: Icheon, Gyeonggi Province in the capital region, Cheongju in the non-capital region, and the production base in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States.

Through this investment, SK Hynix’s Cheongju campus has become an integrated semiconductor cluster encompassing everything from semiconductor production, including NAND flash, HBM, and DRAM, to advanced packaging. Cheongju houses the M11, M12, and M15 fabs that produce NAND, P&T3 which handles back-end operations, and M15X where 20 trillion won was invested to secure next-generation DRAM production capacity. M15X opened its cleanroom in October last year, ahead of the original schedule, and is currently in the equipment installation phase. P&T7 is expected to play a major role in the process of commercializing DRAM produced in the front-end fab M15X into HBM.