Samsung will stop making 2D NAND at Line 12 of its Hwaseong plant as early as March and convert the line into an end fab for 1c DRAM, The Elec reports.
The line carries capacity of 80,000 to 100,000 twelve-inch wafers per month and will move to late-stage DRAM steps including wiring. An end fab handles the back half of the front-end flow rather than the lithography-heavy start of it, which is why The Elec frames the conversion as an efficiency gain across Hwaseong's existing DRAM lines rather than as new wafer starts. Other lines at the site already run DRAM.
None of this is a reversal. Samsung told its fourth-quarter earnings call it would convert legacy processes to advanced ones and that this would include ending planar NAND production, on The Elec's account of the call. What is new is the date and the destination.
1c DRAM is the constraint being bought out of. The Elec reports the node has run into a supply bottleneck against heightened demand, that Samsung is raising 1c spending at both Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek, and that P4 at Pyeongtaek, designed as a hybrid fab for DRAM, NAND and foundry work, is now being steered to DRAM alone. Other Hwaseong DRAM lines are being converted to 1c as well. Sources told the outlet the yield rate is stabilising quickly.
On the NAND side the volume at stake is smaller than the milestone. Planar NAND survives only in low-end parts such as USB memory, where demand is negligible and every major maker has already moved to 3D. Samsung expects the lost South Korean output to be covered by its Xian fab in China, where 3D NAND lines are being upgraded to next-generation processes.
The competitive read is not complicated. Samsung is converting NAND capacity into DRAM capacity at a point when DRAM is the scarcer of the two, and it is doing it on a line old enough that nothing current is being given up to get there. The 1c node feeds HBM4 and Samsung intends to sell it into general-purpose server DRAM as well, so the converted output has two destinations rather than one.
One caution on the customer side. The Elec reports Samsung notified a customer last year that it was ending 2D NAND production, and attributes that to sources rather than to a company statement. Anyone still buying planar parts in volume should read the March date as firm and the notification as already delivered somewhere in the channel.
Bootnote. Samsung began the world's first production of 1Gb NAND flash in 2002 and reached mass production of 3D V-NAND in 2013. The Elec puts Line 12's conversion at 24 years after the company started making planar NAND and 13 years after it started making the vertical kind, which means planar outlived the arrival of its own successor by more than a decade.
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