Contract after contract, one Korean component maker has spent five months locking in buyers for the material that sits between a memory die and the board underneath it.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics disclosed on Oct 19 a deal worth KRW 360.5B, about $251M, to supply package substrates for memory chips to a big unnamed global customer. Supply runs from January through December of next year, and the value equals roughly 3.2 percent of consolidated revenue for the prior year.
That makes seven long-term agreements announced since May, worth more than KRW 4T combined. Multilayer ceramic capacitors and silicon capacitors featured in the earlier ones; the newest pushes the arrangement into substrates.
The part AI made scarce
A package substrate links chip to main board, passes electrical signals and keeps the package from bowing. Taller memory stacks carrying more DRAM layers mean the substrate below has to route a much denser web of connections while holding off warpage that could crack the assembly.
Few suppliers can do that at high yield. Large-area fine-circuit patterning and warp control, developed at the firm’s Yangsan plants, are the capabilities the long-term contracts are buying.
Capacity is tight and slow to add, which is why buyers now sign ahead. New lines take years, and the tools for patterning and inspecting high-end substrates are themselves scarce. Committing to a year of take-or-pay volume beats getting rationed mid-boom.
Confidentiality terms kept the customer unnamed. Whatever its identity, the contract shows the squeeze has shifted from the die to the packaging below it, where capacity cannot be added as fast as DRAM prices climb.
