LG Innotek gears up for FC-BGA substrate mass production

South Korea’s LG Innotek Co. is preparing to mass produce flip chip ball grid array (FC-BGA) substrates from the fourth quarter of this year, which would speed its push into the high-end substrate market.

Recently, it installed manufacturing equipment and machinery for high-density package substrates in the plant under construction in Gumi, about 200 kilometers southeast of Seoul.

It is building the 220,000-square-meter plant in the city, where its production lines are based. It had earmarked 413 billion won ($350 million) to build the FC-BGA facility.

It will be operated as a smart factory, equipped with artificial intelligence, robots and unmanned and intelligent systems. 

The FC-BGA prototype of the plant was unveiled at CES 2023 early this month.

On the sidelines of the world's largest technology show, LG Innotek Chief Executive Jeong Cheol-dong told The Korea Economic Daily that the company would ramp up FC-BGA production to a meaningfully high level from the second half of this year.

An FC-BGA substrate connects a main board to memory chips, a central processing unit and a graphic processing unit. 

The high-performance substrate is used for communication networks and digital TVs, and called the Hermes of the semiconductor sector because of its high price tag.

Once LG begins mass production, it will step up efforts to develop a broad range of FC-BGA packages for use in personal computers and also servers, said an LG official. 

Last June, it began pilot production of the high-performance substrates, which are now being shipped to global customers.

“FC-BGA substrates is the area where LG Innotek, as a leader in the substrate materials market, can do the best,” Jeong said in a statement released on Monday.

The FC-BGA sector is now controlled by a handful of companies such as Japan’s Ibiden Co. and Shinko Denki Co. and Taiwan’s Unimicron.

Supply is expected to remain tight through 2027, driven by the growing artificial intelligence and cloud server markets.

According to the Fuji Chimera Research Institute, the global FC-BGA substrate market is forecast to grow at an annual rate of 9% to $16.4 billion by 2030 from $8 billion in 2022.


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