South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. is poised to start operating its new chip-making line in the country next month at the earliest, joining the race with local rival SK hynix Inc. to ramp up production, industry sources said Wednesday.

Samsung plans to begin the mass production of memory and non-memory chips at the new production line in Hwaseong, just south of Seoul, in the current quarter, according to the sources familiar with the matter.

The new chip fab was completed last year after ground was broken in 2012. It is Samsung's newest production line, besides the one being built in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers southeast of Seoul, for which it will pour more than 15 trillion won ($12.5 billion) over the next two years, the largest amount for a single semiconductor plant by a Korean company.

Part of the new Hwasung production line has already been on a test run for the past few months, with the rest to be fully activated by the end of the year, the sources said.

The new facility will most likely produce high-end dynamic random access memory chips, including the low power double data rate and DDR4. The tech giant also mulls churning out non-memory chips, also known as logic chips, that include application processors at the new facility, they said.

Samsung's push for bolstering the chip supply is the latest in a series of moves by chipmakers in the country to jack up output capacity and reshuffle their product lineups.

On Tuesday, local archrival SK hynix Inc. unveiled a 46 trillion-won investment plan to build three new DRAM fabs by 2024

South Korean chipmakers have been accelerating moves to raise the production of high-end products, such as mobile chips. Samsung recently said it is scaling down the production of the standard DRAM chips that are made for PCs and will focus more on mobile and server chips.

Latest market sources showed that the size of the global semiconductor sector is forecast to grow at a slower pace than past years to $39 million in 2018 from $35 million in 2014. (Yonhap)