Kioxia and Western Digital Said The joint venture Fab 73D NAND production facility at Yokkaichi Operations in Japan will receive up to JPY 92.9 billion ($ 680 million) in subsidies from the Government of Japan. This grant is part of a unique government program designed to boost Japan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry.
Kioxia began construction of the Fab7 facility at its Yokkaichi Plant in late 2020. However, the construction of the Fab shell is incomplete. Kioxia and its partner Western Digital are equipping their fabs with manufacturing tools to begin manufacturing 112- and 162-layer 3D NAND memories this fall. Ultimately, the fab will generate 3D flash memory with more layers.
David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital, said: “We look forward to continuing to drive long-term success with our strategic partner, Kioxia.”
3D NAND and DRAM memory are important for PCs, servers, smartphones, and almost all kinds of advanced devices in use today, but since they are commodity chips, generating both is a financial risk. Their prices are entirely dependent on supply and demand factors. As a result, governments have been reluctant to support DRAM and NAND producers in recent years (if not decades), and companies like Micron and SK Hynix have been less successful in producing DRAM and NAND. Allowed to absorb the person.
Still, the Japanese government seems to be gradually changing its view on the production of 3D NAND. 3D NAND manufacturing may not be the most profitable business on the planet and is prone to cyclical recessions. However, large 3D NAND producers like Kioxia and Western Digital need a large supply and hire thousands of engineers to run their fabs, helping the local semiconductor production industry develop. I am.
Once the semiconductor supply chain enters a country (or region), logic chips like TSMC prefer to establish new fabs in other chip producers, especially in regions with established supply chains and experienced talent. You can attract contract manufacturers.
“Thanks to the support of the Japanese government, we will continue to produce cutting-edge flash memory that is indispensable for the digital society where cloud services, 5G communication, IoT, AI, and autonomous driving are expanding,” said Hayasaka, president and CEO. Nobuo said. Of Kioxia. “We are committed to further developing the semiconductor industry and contributing to the development of domestic and global economies.”
