SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung have met with TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry company, to further strengthen their cooperation in enhancing AI semiconductor competitiveness.

On June 6th (local time), Chairman Chey met with major figures from Taiwan’s IT industry, including TSMC Chairman Mark Liu, in Taipei, Taiwan, to discuss collaboration in the fields of AI and semiconductors.

Chairman Chey conveyed a message of opening a new era of AI that benefits humanity together and agreed to enhance cooperation between SK Hynix and TSMC in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) sector.

In April, SK Hynix signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with TSMC to enhance technical cooperation for developing HBM4 (6th generation HBM) and strengthening advanced packaging technology capabilities.

Starting with HBM4, for which production is planned to begin in 2025, SK Hynix intends to use TSMC’s cutting-edge logic processes for the production of the base die, which is crucial for controlling the HBM by connecting to the GPU. The base die lies beneath the core dies (DRAM chips) stacked on top and vertically connected using Through-Silicon Via (TSV) technology. 

Additionally, the two companies agreed to optimize the combination of SK Hynix’s HBM and TSMC’s CoWoS® technology and respond jointly to customer requests related to HBM.

CoWoS (Chip on Wafer on Substrate) is TSMC’s proprietary process in which a logic chip like a GPU/xPU and HBM are packaged together on a special interposer substrate, integrating them horizontally on a 2D substrate with vertically stacked HBM in what is known as 2.5D packaging.

Chairman Chey’s extensive actions for global cooperation in AI and semiconductors have been ongoing since late last year, highlighting the growing importance of building a global collaborative ecosystem that meets widespread customer demands in these fields.

In December of last year, Chairman Chey visited the headquarters of ASML, a Dutch EUV lithography equipment manufacturer, to negotiate technical cooperation with SK Hynix on technologies for recycling hydrogen gas used in EUV and developing next-generation EUV. Last April, he met with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at NVIDIA’s headquarters in San Jose, USA, to discuss strengthening the partnership between the two companies.

“Chairman Chey’s recent actions stem from the belief that establishing a global cooperation network is crucial for enhancing the competitiveness of Korea’s AI/semiconductor industry and SK’s business strength,” said an SK Group official.

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