Samsung Foundry suffering from chip contamination

Business Korea reports Samsung discovered defects in its foundry products. Not a lot of details are known, but chips made on a 200mm wafer line at the Samsung Electronics' Giheung Plant in Korea ended up defective to the the use of contaminated equipment. The South Korean giant says production has already been normalized and estimates the damage at "billions of Korean won" (one billion Korean won equals $857,950).

However, some experts say that the damage may be much more than estimated by Samsung Electronics. "I understand that Samsung has not calculated the exact amount of the damage yet," said an industry insider. "The loss can be much larger than the company’s estimate.”

Irrespective of the scale of the damage, it really hurts Samsung Electronics that the defects themselves occurred to the global semiconductor leader. This is because Samsung Electronics is investing heavily in the foundry sector to take the global No. 1 position in the system semiconductor sector by 2030.

The affected production line is dedicated to 65nm to 180nm production of eFlash, power, display driver IC, CMOS, RF/IoT, and fingerprint technology solutions.