Who helped Samsung become chip giant

Samsung’s rise in semiconductors was shaped by Lee Kun-hee’s push to expand memory chips, government support, and help from Intel and Japanese technology. The company bought Hankook Semiconductor in 1974, renamed it Samsung Semiconductor, and later invested heavily in DRAM production. By 1984, its Giheung plant was running, and Samsung had developed a 64K DRAM, cutting Korea’s technology gap with Japan to four years.

Lee Kun-hee bought half of Hankook Semiconductor with personal funds and acquired the rest in 1977 before renaming it Samsung Semiconductor the next year.

Samsung set up a semiconductor and computer business team in October 1982 and publicly announced a large-scale memory chip investment in March of the following year.

The Giheung plant began operation in 1984 after special zoning approval from the Korean government and six months of construction.

Samsung developed a 64K DRAM and later a 256K DRAM, with the 64K version becoming the third in the world after the United States and Japan.

Intel exited the DRAM business in 1986 and began buying EPROM chips from Samsung for resale under its own brand.

Published Sep 19, 2026 12:05 am KST

Japanese advisers, U.S. pioneers, state backing transformed Samsung into unstoppable market force

A Samsung Electronics logo / Reuters-Yonhap

Through the 1980s, Japan pushed the United States — the birthplace and longtime leader of the semiconductor industry — out of the world memory chip market, and the damage ran deep enough that Intel gave up DRAM, the short-term memory that holds a computer's working data.

American chipmakers came to believe Japan could not be beaten in memory chips, and Washington and the industry began looking for ways to counter it. Two questions followed: how to contain Japan, and where to find a viable challenger to it.

The country that emerged as a memory chip powerhouse in the 1990s was Korea, and Intel had a hand in how Korea overtook Japan to dominate the world market.

Chip business nearly dropped

Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chul shook his head in disbelief while he sat through a report on the semiconductor company his son had bought. The son was Lee Kun-hee, former Samsung chairman. Lee, then a director at Samsung's broadcasting branch TBC, had acquired Hankook Semiconductor in 1974 after the chipmaker went bankrupt due to financial strain.

Hankook Semiconductor, an early Korean chipmaker, was the country's first, founded by Kim Gyu-han, president of the telecommunications equipment importer Kemco, and Kang Ki-dong, a pioneer in the country's semiconductor industry.

It was the first company in Korea to process wafers — the discs of raw material on which chips are built — into transistors, which it sold to electronics manufacturers. A transistor works like a switch controlling electrical signals, and no electronic product can be built without one.

Hankook Semiconductor, however, could not survive the first oil shock, which struck after the 1973 Middle East war sent crude prices soaring.

Lee Kun-hee had recognized this dependency — no transistors, no electronics — and saw room for growth in the industry. While the oil shock had left the Samsung Group short of cash and in no position to enter a new line of business, he financed the purchase of half the shares with personal funds. He bought the remaining half in 1977 and renamed the company Samsung Semiconductor the following year.

Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul, left, and former chairman Lee Kun-hee / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

Samsung Electronics' official corporate history records how little impact the purchase had. Samsung insiders did not know the acquisition had happened. The forgotten business resurfaced in 1979, when Samsung Electronics absorbed Samsung Semiconductor.

The report that reached Lee Byung-chul put monthly output at 100 million transistors, priced at 1 to 2 cents apiece. He shook his head. He took it for a low-margin business with limited revenue potential. Lee Kun-hee and Samsung Electronics' management persisted, arguing that a component the electronics industry could not function without would only grow more important. The founder eventually relented.

Only chips to feed Samsung

Lee Byung-chul, who had taken a dim view of chipmaking, changed his mind in 1980. Stopping in Tokyo, he met Hidezo Inaba, a longtime acquaintance. Inaba had studied economics at the University of Tokyo, served as director of the National Economic Research Institute and as president of the Sankei Shimbun, and took part in shaping Japanese economic policy after World War II.

According to "Hoam Jajeon," Lee Byung-chul's autobiography, Inaba answered his question — what Japanese industry had to do to survive — by pointing to semiconductors.

"Japan's way to survive depends on advanced technology industries that are lightweight, thin and compact," he said. "In particular, it must concentrate on semiconductors. The Japanese government too is nurturing this as a strategic industry."

Inspired by Inaba's insight, Samsung's founder watched the industry closely. What sharpened his conviction was his 1982 visit to the United States. In San Francisco, he took in the tall buildings and the cars crowding the streets and felt the abundance of an economic superpower, then was startled to see that even this America was losing its own market to Japanese chips. In the autobiography, he called it "a strange phenomenon."

Japanese semiconductor plant / Korea Times file

Visits to Hewlett-Packard and IBM plants in the United States solidified his decision. In "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology," Chris Miller, a professor of international history at Tufts University, describes an employee at HP telling Lee that the reason a company, which started in a garage, had become a giant was "thanks to semiconductors."

IBM showed him its chip production facilities. No company readily opens plants it treats as confidential. Puzzled, he asked why they were willing.

"Just by looking, you can't copy it," an IBM employee told him. The remark reportedly spurred him to act.

Back home, in October 1982, Lee assembled a semiconductor and computer business team. In March the following year, he called Hong Jin-ki, former chairman of the JoongAng Ilbo, then Samsung's media branch, told him the company would invest on a large scale in memory chips, and declared the expansion publicly through the outlet.

A newspaper advertisement for Samsung's semiconductor business published in 1983 / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

Intel turns to Samsung

In expanding the business, Samsung drew help from both the United States and Japan.

According to "Hoam Jajeon," it brought in 64K DRAM technology from Micron Technology in the United States and 16K SRAM technology — the faster memory a processor draws on for immediate work — from Japanese electronics maker Sharp. Engineers who had worked at Intel, IBM and Zilog joined the company. Samsung set up a U.S. subsidiary in Santa Clara, California, and researched chip technology in Korea and the United States at the same time.

Up to that point, Intel was uneasy about an American company partnering with Samsung. Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, worried that Micron's technology transfer meant core American chip technology leaking out.

The Korean government then granted special zoning approval for the Giheung plant site, which it had designated for another purpose. Employees gave up the Lunar New Year holiday, the country's biggest, and worked without a day off, and six months of the construction brought the Giheung plant online in 1984.

Financing followed — what Lee's autobiography calls "the special understanding and cooperation of financial institutions." In short, Samsung's semiconductor business rested on the sacrifice of its workers and on government support: the plant site and the money.

Lee Byung-chul, fourth from right, founder of Samsung Group, inspects the construction site of a semiconductor fabrication plant in Giheung, Gyeonggi Province, in 1983. Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

Samsung went on to develop a 64K DRAM and put it into production, the third in the world after the United States and Japan. Korea, which had trailed the two by more than a decade in chip technology, cut the gap to four years.

The same year, Samsung Electronics also developed a 256K DRAM with far greater storage capacity, and said nothing about it publicly. According to the founder's autobiography, the government asked Samsung to keep it secret for fear of provoking foreign companies.

Around that time, the United States and Japan were locked in a chip war. Japan was raising its chip yields while aggressively cutting prices, squeezing American chipmakers.

If word of Korea's 256K DRAM had come out, Samsung would most likely have faced pressure from both American and Japanese competitors, and it could have collapsed before it reached the market. There was also the risk that the 64K DRAM it had just put into mass production would be made obsolete by the 256K. Samsung had no reason to bring the 256K to market early, and so no reason to announce that it existed.

Intel, under pressure as its DRAM revenue plunged amid intense Japanese competition, exited the DRAM business in 1986. It concentrated instead on the central processing unit, the brain of the computer. At the same time, Samsung Electronics began producing EPROM chips for Intel — erasable programmable read-only memory, a read-only chip that can still store and erase data — and Intel sold them under its own brand.

A signing ceremony for advanced technology cooperation between Samsung and Intel / Korea Times file

The arrangement suited both sides. Intel could lower costs by having EPROMs made in Korea, where labor was cheap, and Samsung secured a stable buyer.

By industry accounts and Miller's book, Samsung Electronics' chips at the time lagged Japanese ones in quality. Intel judged all the same that Samsung was a useful counterweight to Japanese chipmakers.

A former Intel official said Samsung Electronics' semiconductors were lower in quality than their Japanese counterparts at the time, but were reasonably priced and good enough to take market share from Japanese companies. The official said this led Intel to see Samsung Electronics as a good partner.

Intel as partner, rival

U.S. policy aimed at checking Japan's chip industry helped Korea's as well. In 1986, the United States concluded a semiconductor agreement with Japan. At its core was a quota system that limited exports of Japanese DRAM to the American market, together with a price floor that prevented dumping and weakened Japanese price competitiveness. By restricting both volume and price, the United States constrained Japanese suppliers' trade practices. For Korea it was a chance to build.

An Intel pop-up store in Seongsu-dong, Seoul, in 2024 / Courtesy of Intel Korea

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.

三星半导体的崛起得益于李健熙大力拓展存储芯片业务、政府支持以及英特尔和日本技术的帮助。1974年，三星收购了韩国半导体公司，并将其更名为三星半导体，随后大力投资DRAM生产。到1984年，其位于器兴的工厂投入运营，三星成功研发出64K DRAM，将韩国与日本的技术差距缩小至四年。

李健熙用个人资金收购了韩国半导体公司一半的股份，并在 1977 年收购了剩余股份，然后在第二年将其更名为三星半导体公司。

三星于 1982 年 10 月成立了半导体和计算机业务团队，并在次年 3 月公开宣布对存储芯片进行大规模投资。

器兴工厂在获得韩国政府的特殊规划许可并经过六个月的建设后，于 1984 年开始运营。

三星开发了 64K DRAM，后来又开发了 256K DRAM，其中 64K 版本成为继美国和日本之后世界上第三个拥有 64K DRAM 的版本。

英特尔于 1986 年退出 DRAM 业务，并开始从三星购买 EPROM 芯片，然后以自己的品牌转售。

发布于2026年9月19日凌晨12:05（韩国标准时间）

日本顾问、美国先驱和政府支持将三星打造成了一股势不可挡的市场力量。

三星电子标志 / 路透社-韩联社

20 世纪 80 年代，日本将半导体行业的发源地和长期领导者美国挤出了世界存储芯片市场，其造成的损害非常严重，以至于英特尔放弃了 DRAM（用于保存计算机工作数据的短期存储器）。

美国芯片制造商开始认为日本在存储芯片领域无人能敌，华盛顿和业界也开始寻找应对之策。随之而来的是两个问题：如何遏制日本，以及如何找到一个能够与之匹敌的竞争对手。

20 世纪 90 年代崛起成为存储芯片强国的国家是韩国，而英特尔在韩国超越日本主导世界市场的过程中发挥了重要作用。

芯片业务几乎停滞

三星集团创始人李秉喆一边听着关于他儿子收购的半导体公司的报告，一边难以置信地摇头。他的儿子是李健熙，前三星集团董事长。李健熙当时是三星广播公司TBC的董事，1974年，由于财务困境，韩国半导体公司破产，李健熙收购了这家芯片制造商。

韩国半导体是韩国早期的芯片制造商，也是该国第一家芯片制造商，由电信设备进口商Kemco的总裁金圭汉和韩国半导体行业的先驱姜基东创立。

它是韩国第一家将晶圆（芯片制造所用的原材料圆片）加工成晶体管的公司，并将其出售给电子产品制造商。晶体管就像一个控制电信号的开关，任何电子产品都离不开它。

然而，韩泰半导体公司却没能挺过第一次石油危机。1973 年中东战争后，原油价格飙升，引发了第一次石油危机。

李健熙意识到了这种依赖性——没有晶体管，就没有电子产品——并看到了该行业的增长空间。尽管石油危机导致三星集团资金短缺，无力进入新的业务领域，但他仍用个人资金收购了该公司一半的股份。1977年，他又收购了剩余的一半股份，并在次年将公司更名为三星半导体。

三星创始人李秉喆（左）和前董事长李健熙 / 图片由三星电子提供

三星电子的官方企业历史记录显示，此次收购的影响微乎其微。三星内部人士甚至都不知道发生了这笔收购。直到1979年，三星电子收购三星半导体后，这项被遗忘的业务才重新浮出水面。

李秉喆收到的报告显示，晶体管的月产量为1亿个，每个售价1到2美分。他摇了摇头，认为这是一个利润微薄、收入潜力有限的行业。李健熙和三星电子的管理层坚持认为，这种电子行业不可或缺的元件只会变得越来越重要。最终，李秉喆妥协了。

只给三星供应芯片

李秉喆原本对芯片制造行业不屑一顾，但在1980年改变了看法。他途经东京时，遇到了相识多年的稻叶秀三。稻叶秀三曾在东京大学学习经济学，担任过国家经济研究所所长和产经新闻社社长，并在二战后参与制定了日本的经济政策。

据李秉喆的自传《湖岩自传》记载，稻叶通过指出半导体行业来回答他提出的问题——日本工业要想生存下去必须做什么。

“日本的生存之道在于发展轻薄紧凑的先进技术产业，”他说道，“尤其要集中精力发展半导体产业。日本政府也正将其作为战略产业加以扶持。”

受稻叶启治的启发，三星创始人密切关注着整个行业。1982年的美国之行更加坚定了他的信念。在旧金山，他目睹了高楼林立、车水马龙的街道，感受到了经济超级大国的繁荣景象，却震惊地发现，即使是美国，也在将自己的市场拱手让给日本芯片。他在自传中称之为“一种奇特的现象”。

日本半导体工厂/《韩国时报》资料图

参观美国惠普和IBM的工厂进一步坚定了他的决定。在《芯片战争：争夺全球最关键技术的斗争》一书中，塔夫茨大学国际历史学教授克里斯·米勒描述了一位惠普员工告诉李小龙，这家从车库起家的公司之所以能成为巨头，是因为“半导体技术”。

IBM向他展示了芯片生产设施。没有哪家公司会轻易公开那些被视为机密的工厂。他感到困惑，便问他们为什么愿意这样做。

“光看是复制不出来的，”一位IBM员工告诉他。据说，这句话促使他采取了行动。

1982年10月，李健熙回到韩国后组建了半导体和计算机业务团队。次年3月，他致电三星媒体部门《中央日报》前董事长洪真基，告知其公司将大规模投资存储芯片领域，并通过该报公开宣布了这一扩张计划。

1983年三星半导体业务的报纸广告 / 图片由三星电子提供

英特尔转向三星

在拓展业务的过程中，三星得到了美国和日本的帮助。

据《Hoam Jajeon》报道，三星从美国美光科技公司引进了64K DRAM技术，并从日本电子制造商夏普公司引进了16K SRAM技术——这种高速内存供处理器即时使用。曾在英特尔、IBM和Zilog等公司工作的工程师也加入了三星。三星在美国加利福尼亚州圣克拉拉设立了子公司，并同时在韩国和美国开展芯片技术研发。

在此之前，英特尔对一家美国公司与三星合作感到不安。英特尔联合创始人戈登·摩尔担心，美光的技术转让意味着美国核心芯片技术会泄露出去。

韩国政府随后批准了器兴工厂用地的特殊规划用途，该地块原本被指定用于其他用途。工人们放弃了韩国最大的节日——农历新年假期，一天假都没休息，经过六个月的建设，器兴工厂于1984年投入运营。

融资随之而来——正如李在自传中所说的“金融机构的特殊理解与合作”。简而言之，三星的半导体业务建立在员工的牺牲和政府的支持之上：工厂用地和资金。

1983年，三星集团创始人李秉喆（右四）视察位于京畿道器兴市的半导体制造厂工地。图片由三星电子提供。

三星随后研发出64K DRAM并投入生产，成为继美国和日本之后的世界第三个实现这一目标的国家。韩国在芯片技术方面曾落后于美日两国十多年，如今将差距缩小到四年。

同年，三星电子还研发出容量更大的256K DRAM，但并未公开披露。据创始人自传所述，政府要求三星对此保密，以免激怒外国公司。

大约在那个时期，美国和日本陷入了一场芯片大战。日本在提高芯片良率的同时，大力降低价格，挤压美国芯片制造商的生存空间。

如果韩国256K DRAM的消息泄露，三星很可能面临来自美国和日本竞争对手的压力，甚至可能在产品上市前就倒闭。此外，三星刚刚投入量产的64K DRAM也面临着被256K DRAM取代的风险。三星没有理由提前将256K DRAM推向市场，因此也没有理由对外宣称它的存在。

由于受到日本厂商的激烈竞争，英特尔的DRAM收入大幅下滑，面临巨大压力，最终于1986年退出DRAM业务。此后，英特尔转而专注于中央处理器（CPU），即计算机的大脑。与此同时，三星电子开始为英特尔生产EPROM芯片——可擦除可编程只读存储器，这是一种可以存储和擦除数据的只读芯片——英特尔则以自有品牌销售这些芯片。

三星与英特尔先进技术合作签约仪式 / 《韩国时报》资料图

这种安排对双方都有利。英特尔可以在劳动力成本低廉的韩国生产EPROM，从而降低成本；而三星则获得了一个稳定的买家。

根据业内人士的说法和米勒的著作，当时三星电子的芯片质量落后于日本芯片。尽管如此，英特尔仍然认为三星是制衡日本芯片制造商的有力力量。

一位英特尔前高管表示，当时三星电子的半导体质量虽然不如日本同行，但价格合理，足以从日本公司手中夺取市场份额。这位高管称，正是这一点让英特尔将三星电子视为理想的合作伙伴。

英特尔既是合作伙伴，也是竞争对手

美国旨在遏制日本芯片产业的政策也惠及了韩国。1986年，美国与日本达成半导体协议。该协议的核心是配额制度，限制日本DRAM对美国市场的出口，并设定价格下限以防止倾销，从而削弱日本的价格竞争力。通过限制数量和价格，美国约束了日本供应商的贸易行为。这对韩国而言是一个发展良机。

2024年，英特尔在首尔圣水洞开设了一家快闪店 / 图片由英特尔韩国公司提供

本文来自《韩国日报》（《韩国时报》的姊妹报），由人工智能生成系统翻译，并由《韩国时报》编辑。