GigaDevice recently suspended due to planning a major asset restructuring, followed by the official announcement will be no more than 70 million US dollars to subscribe for SMIC placement shares in the details, GigaDevice is wholly owned overseas subsidiary of Hong Kong core technology Jia Yi Microelectronics As the main body, at a price of HK $ 10.65 per share, approximately HK $ 532.5 million to subscribe for SMIC's offering of 5,000.337 shares, representing about 1.02% of the total share capital of SMIC after the placement.
GigaDevice used to be known as the newly emerging NOR Flash supplier in the mainland. It is similar to Taiwan's Wang Wang and Winbond products. It has both NOR Flash lines and SLC / MLC NAND Flash lines. NOR Flash applications cover PC, mobile phone, set-top box, consumer electronics, automotive electronics, industrial equipment, etc. Today, the world's top five major NOR Flash suppliers include Cypress, Micron, Wang Hong, Winbond, and Beijing Siu Yi Innovation.
Early GigaDevice in the industry gives the image of the price killer, but in recent years gradually become one of the world's leading Flash suppliers, and simultaneously expand into the field of logic chip, a microcontroller (MCU) supplier, memory, Logic two routes take.
GigaDevice This year there is also a layout shocked the semiconductor industry across the Taiwan Strait, that is, after the National Integrated Circuit Industry Fund (large fund) investment, signed a contract with the Hefei municipal government, smashed 18 billion yuan (more than NT 80 billion yuan) joined 19-nanometer DRAM Technology R & D projects, be a long time passed the news come true, but also formally with the Purple Light Group's Yangtze River Storage, UMC's Jinhua IC became one of the three storage camps in mainland China.
Looking back, this GigaDevice and SMIC expansion of cooperation, the industry is a positive view of the matter, that GigaDevice this year through the subscription of shares SMIC shares, the two sides can develop multi-level strategic cooperation and become more firm cooperation partner.
As early as September 2017, GigaDevice signed a procurement strategic cooperation agreement with SMIC of about RMB1.2 billion on the basis that the supply of silicon wafers was very tight this year, but the demand for NOR Flash chips continued to increase and continued to fall short of demand. GigaDevice SMIC and the contract will be able to obtain a stable capacity protection, the re-share SMIC, a symbol of further cooperation between the two sides.
GigaDevice currently needs SMIC-supported foundry capabilities including NOR Flash chips in 65nm, 90nm and 0.13μm processes, as well as SLC / MLC NAND chips in 38nm and 24nm processes.
Compared to Taiwan's Winbond, Wang Wang and other Flash chip suppliers, the two companies have their own wafer fab capacity backing, only GigaDevice is a pure IC design company.Because this year, even looking back two years , 8-inch / 12-inch silicon wafer out of stock without solution, only fully grasp the foundry capacity in order to win this wave of Flash out of stock, so GigaDevice and SMIC actively tighten alliances, there is a background of.
For SMIC, although good at logic chip OEM, according to statistics SMIC ranked the fifth in the global foundry industry market share of 5.4%, second in TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC, Samsung Electronics.
In the current layout of the semiconductor industry, SMIC is a semiconductor manufacturer actively supported by the state. It is bound to have a diversified development of logic and memory product lines. Therefore, the strategic alliance with GigaDevice is considered to be a reasonable development by the industry.