Korean media: Samsung and SK Hynix refuse to participate in South Korea's PIM chip project

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix declined to participate in a preliminary review of the South Korean government's development of a next-generation memory processing (PIM) project.

South Korean media thelec reported that South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy selected PIM AI semiconductors as the national project, and South Korea's Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation Institute ((IITP)) plans to conduct a preliminary review of the project from June to July. If the project passes the review, it will be launched by the end of the year and will receive funding of 992.4 billion won between 2022 and 2028.

An IITP official familiar with the project said they expected the project to be difficult to move forward because major storage companies Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix refused to participate directly in the project, only as members of the steering committee.

Another person familiar with the matter said the two companies had little incentive to participate in the project because they also had the ability to develop such storage semiconductors.

In addition, the two companies do not want the government to interfere in the development of such chips, and the budget of the project is small compared with the billions of dollars each invested by Samsung and SK Hynix in research and development, people familiar with the matter added.

It is reported that PIM combines the AI processor with memory. This is different from the traditional von Neumann structure, in which CPU and memory exchange data with each other. Because memory will process the data itself, this will greatly save power consumption and shorten processing time.