Samsung to boost chip substrate investment after Apple order

Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. will expand its manufacturing facilities for high-performance package substrates in both South Korea and Vietnam, after it was named the primary supplier of the flip-chip ball grid array (FC-BGA) substrate for use in Apple Inc.’s new versions of MacBook laptops and tablets.

Samsung will spend 300 billion won ($231 million) on the facility expansion, in addition to the 1.9 trillion won it had poured into the FC-BGA production lines in both countries, a company official said on Wednesday.

The FC-BGA connects semiconductor chips to the mainboard, which requires the most advanced technology, compared with general substrates.

Thanks to their fast data processing capabilities, package substrates are used mainly for central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for high-performance and high-density circuit connections.

Samsung’s FC-BGA will be embedded in Apple’s next-generation M2 processor to be installed in MacBook laptops, iPads and other tablets.

This year, Samsung plans to mass-produce package substrates for use in servers to become the first Korean company to do so, according to the company official.

From December last year until June this year, Samsung has injected a combined 1.9 trillion won into its FC-BGA-related facilities, in its biggest investment in a single segment over the past decade. A chunk of the spending, or 1.3 trillion won, went to its Vietnam facilities.

The high-performance, multi-layer package substrates are also expanding its use to self-driving cars and AI-powered services such as robots and the metaverse digital space.

Samsung also supplies package substrates to Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. It is striving to build its presence in the FC-BGA substrate market dominated by Japan’s Ibiden Co. and Taiwan’s Unimicron Technology Corp.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article