South Korea has started pushing the operational discipline of commercial chip plants into its public research fabs, with Samsung Electronics supplying the playbook.
The engagement ran six months, from March through August, at POSTECH’s Nano Convergence Technology Center. Staff from Samsung’s Win-Win Cooperation Center, part of its Device Solutions division, led the work. The team transferred methods from its supplier consulting program, and the center adopted Samsung’s on-site improvement practices for safety, cleanliness and equipment reliability.
Results were presented on September 11. The work follows a memorandum signed in March last year between the Ministry of Science and ICT and three chipmakers: Samsung, SK hynix and DB HiTek.
Public nanofabs matter because they do double duty. They host university and institute research, and they let materials, parts and equipment makers without a fab of their own run real process tests. The ministry reckons that steadier tool operation and better process reliability will shorten the path from lab result to industrial use.
Ji Hyun-ki, an executive vice president who heads the Win-Win Cooperation Center, said the aim is to spread commercial manufacturing know-how across domestic public fabs so equipment and materials suppliers can move faster.
More sites are next in line: the National NanoFab Center, the Korea Advanced Nano Fab Center, Seoul National University’s Inter-university Semiconductor Research Center, a sensor and semiconductor institute at DGIST, and a materials and equipment technology center at ETRI.
