Semiconductor History | 기흥, 용인 — The Chip That Became a Registered Cultural Property

On 27 August 2013 the Korean state registered a mass-produced memory chip as a cultural property. It is 국가등록문화재 제563호, a Samsung 64K DRAM from 1983, and the government's own description of it counts the parts: about 64,000 transistors among some 150,000 devices, joined by around eight million lines, on a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail, holding roughly eight thousand characters. The photograph comes from the heritage record and shows a display case: a full wafer of the part standing on a mount, two packaged devices beside it, and a label reading 64K DRAM. The work that produced it did not happen on this campus. It happened at 부천, on a line that was making basic non-memory parts, where the team installed DRAM equipment alongside the existing production and built a clean room from little more than the concept of one. Samsung had licensed 64K DRAM technology from Micron. Engineers sent to train in the United States were, by the later account of 김광호, who ran the company afterwards, kept away from the process and design areas. So the process was worked out at home, and it took about six months. The date it finished is not settled. Samsung's own histories give 1 December 1983; contemporary and later Korean accounts place it in November, and one names 19 November. The state's description calls it Korea's first commercialised semiconductor of its kind and the world's third. That is the government's formulation, and it is worth attributing rather than repeating as a plain fact. What is not in dispute is how the country reacted. The celebration drew around five hundred people, including the Speaker of the National Assembly, the Prime Minister, the ministers for trade and for science, and the heads of the two main business federations. A commodity component had become a matter of state. The pin is 기흥 because this is what the decision built. The site was chosen in 1983, ground was broken that September, and the first line went up across the following winter. Everything Samsung has since made in memory descends from that line, and the campus is now a working fab with no public face and nothing for a visitor to see. Where the registered object physically sits is not something the public record states clearly, and Korean reference works that place it at this site are not sourced well enough to repeat. In November 2021 the heritage numbering system was abolished and the chip was re-designated without its number. It is now a registered national heritage item, which is a slightly stranger thing to be than number 563. Photo: 문화재청 (Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea), KOGL Type 1, via Wikimedia Commons.