By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter
Hynix Semiconductor, the world's No. 3 flash chipmaker after Samsung Electronics, will start the operation of its advanced 12-inch chip line in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, Thursday.
The M11 factory has been under construction since April, last year. The facility is capable of producing 40,000 wafers monthly on advanced 300 millimeters.
Sources say the Korean company is planning to halt its outdated M9 200 millimeter wafer line for profitability reasons.
By starting the operation of the plant, Hynix is set to raise the monthly output capacity to 100,000 units in 2009.
The Cheongju plant will initially use 48-nanometer processing technology to produce high-density NAND flash memory chips, gradually migrating to 41-nanometer this year and the 30-nanometer level in 2009.
Hynix has already budgeted 1.1 trillion won to build the line and plans to spend an additional 3.2 trillion won, in line with its already announced capital expenditure of 4.3 trillion won for the NAND chip line.
Hynix said in February that it may delay the operation of the M11 line from March, citing falling chip prices. NAND chips are widely used in high-end handheld gadgets such as MP3 players, car navigation systems and pricey mobile phones.
A large part of the company’s success comes from strong sales of Samsung Electronics NAND flash products with sales reaching to $1.42 billion in the latest quarter, taking up 42.3 percent of the total market share.
Hynix is making every effort to raise profitability by stepping back the "market share war" between its Taiwanese and Japanese rivals.
It is using MetaRAM’s new DDR3 technology in its next-generation R-DIMMs, including what is called the world’s first 16GB 2-rank DIMM, which it demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
Its new 16GB and 8GB 2-rank DIMMs could triple DDR memory capacity in servers and workstations, enabling what is claimed to be the world’s highest density per channel without degrading performance.