Samsung Electronics has commenced operations at its 198,000 sq.m Line-16 Memory Semiconductor fabrication facility. Construction of the facility was started during May 2010 and installations were completed by May 2011.
Trial production was conducted during June 2011 and the facility was made fully operational during August. The Line-16 fab has been built with a total investment of 12 trillion Korean won.
Samsung also announced the mass production of the 20 nm class NAND flash memory chips. The production is expected to reach a capacity of 10,000 chips per month measuring 12 ”. The company plans to develop and produce new semiconductors with 10 nm class technology and higher density. Additionally Samsung will commence large-scale production of the 20 nm class double data rate-3 dynamic random access memory (DDR3 DRAM) with a density of 2 Gigabits. The 20 nm class results in 40% lower energy consumption and at the same time increases production rate by 50%. The company has also planned to upgrade its mass production line to manufacture the DDR3 DRAM with densities of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB by 2012.
Samsung, which manufactures and develops technologies in the areas of telecommunication, digital convergence, semiconductor and digital media has total employee strength of 190,500 spread across 206 offices located in 28 different countries.