Memory chips accounted for US$7.45 billion, with system chips accounting for US$3.8 billion, an increase of 63% and 4.6%, respectively, from last year.

South Korea's exports fell 7.8 percent on-year in the first 20 days of this month due mainly to weak demand from China and fewer working days, but sales of Semiconductors soared nearly 40 percent, data showed Wednesday.

SK hynix Inc. is in the spotlight after it was reported that Japanese NAND flash manufacturer Kioxia Holdings Corp. made a proposal to the South Korean chipmaker to use its NAND production facilities in a bid to break through to a merger with its U.S. peer Western Digital Corp. (WD).

Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corporation announced today that their joint venture manufacturing facilities at Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants have been approved to receive an up to 150 billion yen subsidy.

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are planning to mass-produce GDDR7 DRAM, a next-generation DRAM for graphics cards, within the first half of this year. GDDR7 DRAM, which is mainly used in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) -- a core of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era -- is expected to continue South Korea’s dominance in the Semiconductor industry following High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).

The market capitalization gap between South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Taiwan’s TSMC, leading Semiconductor companies, has widened over the past year. While TSMC has benefited from rising expectations in AI, South Korean firms are considered undervalued.

To achieve higher-speed optical communication compared to electricity, collaboration with chipmakers is essential. NTT plans to collaborate with Intel for the central processing unit (CPU) and with SK hynix for memory chips.

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix will build the world’s largest and best Semiconductor mega cluster in the southern part of Gyeonggi Province with a total investment of 622 trillion won. The Korean government will support this project by creating infrastructure and an investment environment, strengthening the Semiconductor ecosystem and securing super-wide gap technologies and excellent human resources.

According to sources in the Semiconductor industry on Monday, Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions (DS) has set its operating profit target for 2024 at 11.5 trillion won, accounting for about one-third of the South Korean electronics behemoth’s total operating profit estimate for this year.

SK hynix has embarked on strengthening its research and development (R&D) capabilities to enhance its high-performance NAND competitiveness by successively recruiting NAND flash memory experts from Intel with decades of experience.

On Dec. 25, Choi Si-young, the President overseeing the foundry (chip contract manufacturing) business at Samsung Electronics, announced during his keynote speech at IEDM 2023 in the U.S. that “the first wafer would be produced in the second half of next year at the Taylor factory, with mass production commencing in 2025.”

The global HBM market, presently dominated by Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, is projected to grow from approximately 2.5 trillion won this year to about 8 trillion won by 2028.

According to industry officials on Dec. 18, SK hynix announced at the IEDM 2023, a global Semiconductor conference held in the U.S. this month, that it has secured reliability for the Hybrid Bonding process used in HBM manufacturing.

CMM, short for CXL Memory Module, is a memory specification based on CXL by the international Semiconductor standardization organization JEDEC. Inside Samsung, CXL is commonly referred to as CMM.

Samsung Electronics Co. and ASML Holding N.V. have reached a preliminary agreement to build a research and development facility in South Korea with a joint investment of 1 trillion won ($760 million).