[Heart of Innovation, Corporate Research Labs ②] IBM Was the Seed of Korea's Semiconductor Miracle

Robert Dennard, Former IBM Researcher Who Developed DRAM
The New York Times: "He Changed the Future of Computing"

Robert Dennard, former IBM researcher, is holding the DRAM he originally developed. IBM

There is no doubt that semiconductors are the industry sustaining South Korea today. Among them, DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) stands as the flagship of the Korean semiconductor sector. Even the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power artificial intelligence (AI) would be meaningless without high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is built by stacking DRAM. DRAM is the backbone of the Korean economy. In 1966, no one could have imagined that this tiny chip would lead humanity’s digital revolution and elevate South Korea to a global technological powerhouse. Who could have predicted that its greatest bloom would occur in Korea?

The beginning of it all was a quiet laboratory at IBM’s Watson Research Center, and inside, the mind of the brilliant scientist Dr. Robert Dennard.

At the time, computer memory was dominated by SRAM, which consisted of six transistors. It was expensive, bulky, and consumed a lot of power. Dr. Dennard conceived an innovative idea: a much simpler structure that could store data using just a single transistor and a capacitor. This new memory, smaller, cheaper, and more energy-efficient, was named 'DRAM.' When Dr. Dennard passed away in 2024, The New York Times paid tribute to him as the inventor who created the mass-storage chip essential to modern computing. This recognized his role in replacing massive storage devices with semiconductors and changing the future of computing. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, also worked with him. Dr. Dennard’s tenure at IBM lasted from 1958 to 2014-a remarkable 56 years.

The seed of DRAM took root in Korea and grew into a vast forest thanks to a deep connection with IBM. Beginning in the 1970s, Samsung, under the leadership of former chairmen Lee Byungchul and Lee Kunhee, devoted itself to the semiconductor industry. The expiration of IBM’s DRAM patents provided Samsung with the crucial foundation to write its legend of “technological supremacy” in what was once a barren land for semiconductors. Samsung Electronics continued to collaborate closely with IBM, relentlessly pursuing research and development to improve yields and advance fabrication technologies, ultimately rising to become the world’s leading memory semiconductor company. The small initiative launched by the Watson Research Center changed the fate of the Korean economy.

Decades later, IBM no longer manufactures DRAM directly, but it still wields tremendous influence at the top of the semiconductor ecosystem. Recently, Rapidus, a next-generation semiconductor company established by the Japanese government as a national priority, visited IBM’s Watson Research Center to learn about the state-of-the-art 2-nanometer (1 nm = one-billionth of a meter) process technology. IBM’s core server central processing units (CPUs) are manufactured by Samsung. According to an IBM researcher, Samsung Electronics engineers are still collaborating with IBM here on DRAM research.