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Semiconductors have flooded the news in recent months as chip shortages have brought about long lead times on products from cars to computers.
Less attention has been paid to what undergirds those chips, the substrates to which they’re affixed, and how this crucial piece plays into their computing power.
South Korean packaging giant SKC, however, has been hard at work behind the scenes to develop a technology it says will revolutionize the sector, and it’s coming to market at what seems to be the perfect time.
SKC has made plastic films at its complex in Covington, Ga., since 1996. The factory was a pioneering Korean manufacturing investment in the state, showing the value of an investment office it had opened in Seoul in 1985.
Taking such a large footprint 26 years ago — more than 300 acres — has proven to be a boon for the company, which has expanded multiple times and now has room for Absolics, a new brand and subsidiary, to build a semiconductor substrate factory in two phases.
Previously announced as a $473 million investment, SKC announced at a Nov. 1 groundbreaking that Absolics would boost its spending to around $600 million.
According to Absolics CEO Jun Oh, it will first build a low-volume “smart factory” to the tune of $240 million, with more than 100 pieces of equipment including anti-vibration technology, hiring 140 with a likely launch in December 2023. About half of the initial 120,000 square feet will be occupied by clean rooms staffed by more than 50 high-tech engineers. By 2025, with its processes proven out and customer base established, Absolics plans to build a bigger mass-production site, investing $360 million and hiring 270 more technicians for a total of 410 jobs.
Why Glass?
Promising an “absolute solution for integrated circuits,” the acronym behind the Absolics name, CTO Sungjin Kim said glass substrates offer a way to quench the seemingly unending thirst for computing power.
Glass, he said, is a “paradigm shifting solution” in an age of ever-expanding data centers, artificial intelligence and machine learning, drones and autonomous vehicles.
“Their thirst never stops,” Dr. Kim of advanced computing applications at a grand opening attended by company leaders, Newton County and Covington leaders, officials U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff and Georgia Department of Economic Development Commissioner Pat Wilson. “We are providing more solutions for our customers’ needs to quench this thirst.”
Mr. Kim should know, as he helped develop the technology at Georgia Tech, where he served as a professor from 2012-15. He worked with companies across the semiconductor supply chain as well as the Georgia Tech 3D Systems Packaging Research Center to come up with a way to pack more processing computing power onto a glass base layer that can tolerate higher temperatures while allowing for denser connections between chips, Center Director Madhavan Swaminathan told the audience in a technical description of the properties of glass.
The company notes that in one Korea Telecom data center in Seoul, Absolics’s solution was able to reduce power consumption by 50 percent and the size of the facility by 80 percent, adding a green sheen to a product that sells mainly on its performance bona fides.
“In the foreseeable future, I would like to dare say that Absolics’s glass substrate will be the key material in the high-performance computing industry, as well as a game-changer in overcoming what were once considered to be insurmountable limits in this semiconductor industry,” said Woncheol Park, the CEO of SKC, during the ceremony.
Betting on CHIPS
Mr. Park said SKC is positioning Absolics as a “reliable partner” for the industry at a time of shifting supply chains. While initially the substrates will be exported to Asia, where most electronics are made, company leaders believe that sensitive manufacturing will come back to the United States.
That’s the impetus behind the recently passed CHIPS Act, in which Congress allocated $50 billion in incentives for U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing.
Mr. Ossoff, who was present at the groundbreaking, voted for the law as part of his ongoing effort to support American primacy in strategic sectors — often with the help of Korean technology at home in Georgia.
The senator led a delegation to Korea last year and met with officials from SK On and Hyundai Motor Group, which are spending billions on battery and electric-vehicle projects in the state. He said he’s in touch with Korean business leaders on a “weekly basis” given their extensive investments, and he noted the importance of the CHIPS Act and other initiatives to bolster U.S.-based research along with production.
“This project is a testament to Georgia Tech as a world-leading research institution and to public investment in research and development,” Mr. Ossoff told Global Atlanta after shoveling ceremonial dirt at the groundbreaking. “The CHIPS Act includes substantial strengthening of American research and development alongside the boost to semiconductor manufacturing,” and also heralds “the kinds of partnerships between research institutions, the private sector, and local, state and federal governments that yield these kinds of industrial developments.”
Mr. Oh, the Absolics CEO, said the company had a good chance for qualifying for the incentives once its expenditures have been logged and that it will certainly lodge an application under the law for a piece of those funds.
“We believe that we are a strong candidate for that in various reasons. No. 1, as you heard, is the cooperation between the community and Georgia Tech. Together we are building groundbreaking technologies. This is new technology, and also we believe that we are bringing a new ecosystem in the packaging area. This is very important.”
The company adopted the Absolics brand, he said, to be seen fully as an American firm and to distinguish its unique products.
Mr. Wilson, the economic development commissioner, said SKC/Absolics is a prime example of how international friendships, properly nurtured over time, can pay huge dividends for the state.
The SKC project is particularly instructive, he said, since the technology was initiated in Korea and proven out through the Georgia Research Alliance. It’s now being made here for export to the world. The SK Group, a massive Korean conglomerate known as a chaebol, is also behind the SK On battery facility in Commerce that has already begun production after a $2.6 billion investment.
“There is no better way to celebrate the future with a country and a company than to do that with a friend we have had for a long time,” Mr. Wilson said. “This circle of relationships truly has paid off over a number of years and so I get to say thanks.”
Mr. Wilson and Mr. Ossoff also offered condolences for the stampede in the Itaewon district of Seoul that killed 150 people, including one Georgian, during the first Halloween celebrations since Korea’s pandemic restrictions were lifted earlier this year.
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