While Samsung comfortably leads the smartphone industry with devices like the Galaxy S23 Ultra, its fortunes in the chip industry have been different. The company’s key rival, TSMC, dominates the segment, although Samsung has tried its best to gain parity, even coming close on some occasions. So it would be a big win for a company like Samsung to have some of the industry’s best talents on board to fulfill its ambitions in the semiconductor business. The manufacturer has done exactly that by hiring former TSMC engineer and industry veteran Lin Jun-cheng.
Samsung hasn’t put out a statement on the new talent acquisition, with the news emerging from local South Korean outlets, per The Korea Herald. These reports claim Lin has been hired as the senior VP of the advanced packaging team as part of the Device Solutions division. In the new role, Lin Jun-cheng will supposedly take charge of bolstering Samsung’s chip packaging technologies, a key driver in the rapid evolution and development of chipsets.
Lin has years of experience working for TSMC, specifically from 1999 to 2017, and was deeply involved in the development of 3D packaging tech for the Taiwanese chip maker (via SamMobile), which is a manufacturing method that stacks integrated circuits on top of each other within a chip. After departing in 2017, the engineer served as the CEO of Skytech, a fellow Taiwan-based company known for making essential semiconductor parts.
The engineer’s leap to Samsung Foundry will undoubtedly bolster the South Korean manufacturer’s goals of going toe-to-toe with TSMC in the chip business. As the Herald notes, this hiring is part of an aggressive push by the chief of Samsung’s Device Solutions division, Kyung Kye-hyun, to supercharge its semiconductor unit.
As for Samsung’s long-term plans, the manufacturer is spending $200 billion in Taylor, Texas to set up 11 chip production plants. The first of them is set to go up in 2024, involving more than 2,000 workers specializing in making chips for high-performance computing, 5G, and AI, to name a few. We may also see a few advanced Exynos chipsets rolling out of this new factory by next year.
