South Korea will make an effort to convince the US to allow its chip manufacturers in China to maintain their present levels of semiconductor investment as Washington gets ready to implement new measures to restrict foreign investment in China.
As per Yonhap News on Tuesday, citing officials from the foreign ministry, the main goal of the so-called guardrail provision is to stop businesses that get US assistance from operating in risky nations.
Investing In China
South Korean officials are debating possible defense strategies for their nation’s businesses that have already made investments in China.
Comprehensive US export regulations that were disclosed in October have been postponed for one year for South Korean businesses in order to allow them to import equipment for their cutting-edge facilities in China.
Given that both Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix depend on China as a major market and location for the production of their memory chips, it is unclear how they would operate without a license extension.
The Biden administration is looking to its international allies for support in order to impose broad restrictions on the sale of cutting-edge chip equipment to China. This is part of a strategy to stop China from advancing in a number of cutting-edge technologies that could endanger America’s position as the world’s leading power.
The US, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, collectively known as the “Chip 4 Alliance,” met via video conference on February 16 to talk about an early warning system to guarantee a steady chip supply but postponed negotiations on export restrictions.
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Leading Chip Makers In China
In the meantime, according to Knometa Research’s analysis of the installed wafer capacity in the IC sector, Global Wafer Capacity 2023, Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix account for three-quarters of all leading-edge wafer capacity.
Towards the end of 2022, Samsung was the largest supplier of cutting-edge and lagging-edge capacity in the sector.
The business is a leading manufacturer of advanced logic products, including SoCs for the fabless semiconductor industry and low-power, high-performance application processors for Samsung’s smartphones. It is also the industry’s top provider of DRAM and NAND flash memory devices.
In all four of the process generation groups, TSMC, the largest pure-play foundry in the market, was ranked among the top five businesses. With 39 fab lines and a wide range of process technologies available, TSMC serves a wide range of customers.
Several pure-play foundries, such as UMC and SMIC, are important players in the established technology market.
Texas Instruments was the biggest source of capacity for large-feature technologies at the end of the year, leading the market in analog and analog-centric mixed-signal ICs.
STMicroelectronics is one of the largest manufacturers of analog and microcontroller products, which are frequently produced using established and complex manufacturing processes.
The World Wafer Capacity 2023 study includes rankings that go beyond the top five that are presented here.
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