Yoon Administration Expands Budget to Foster Next-Generation AI Memory 'PIM'... Expecting Benefits for Related Stocks

[Asia Economy Reporter Jang Hyowon] The Yoon Seok-yeol administration has reviewed and approved the ‘2023 Budget Proposal.’ The support budget for the semiconductor industry was finalized at 390 billion KRW, an increase of 50 billion KRW compared to last year. The budget also includes support for Processing-In-Memory (PIM), known as the next-generation AI semiconductor.

Last year, our government announced that as part of the ‘Next-Generation Intelligent Semiconductor Technology Development Project,’ which will invest 1 trillion KRW by 2029, it will promote support for PIM semiconductors worth 400 billion KRW starting this year. According to data from the Ministry of Science and ICT, the global market size for PIM semiconductors is expected to grow to between 208 trillion and 374 trillion KRW by 2025.

Processing-In-Memory (PIM) intelligent semiconductors were successfully developed by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix in February last year. Commercial production preparations for PIM semiconductors are also underway, and semiconductor material, parts, and equipment companies related to this are expected to benefit.

In particular, Yeongchang Chemical, a chemical material company for semiconductors, has completed the development of TSV slurry, a core polishing agent essential for AI semiconductor precision, and has passed evaluation on the mass production line. Once yield verification is completed, production is expected to begin in the second half of this year.

Recently, tungsten slurry also passed customer mass production evaluations and is expected to start mass production around the end of this year. These slurry products are anticipated to generate significant sales starting next year, with expected sales exceeding 20 billion KRW from 2024.

PIM, recognized as a next-generation memory semiconductor, is a memory with built-in processing capabilities inside the semiconductor. When the data exchanged between the computer CPU and memory increases, computing speed decreases; PIM overcomes this by processing some computations within the memory itself, reducing data movement between the CPU and memory. This results in system performance improving by more than twice and system energy consumption decreasing by about 70%. Therefore, PIM memory is evaluated as an optimized semiconductor for big data processing, artificial intelligence computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT).