Yusco's 12-inch fab plans to use a co-manufacturing model focused on fabless investments, a symbol of China's new direction of finding funds from its clients without having to rely solely on the government ...
Guangzhou, China, has also joined the ranks of China's active construction of wafer fab recently a plan to invest billions of dollars in Guangzhou fab, using a focus from the fabless IC design companies to invest in the common mode and establish an internal customer base As China tries to establish its semiconductor industry, the list of new and planned fabs is on the rise.
The so-called CanSemi project plans to build a 300 mm wafer fab that will produce 30,000 wafers per month and will become the capital of Guangdong province, Guangzhou In recent months, a number of electronics companies, including Foxconn and LG, have been actively investing.
According to a report by EE Times' sister publication ESM China on December 27 last year, YMCI's 12-inch wafer fab could start operation as early as 2019. In China's largest foundry, Zhang Rujing, one of the founders of SMIC, is said to be hosting the program.
It is reported that Zhang Rujing also participated in another plan to set up a chip design company in Guangzhou related to his initial idea is to build a foundry in Ningbo, Zhejiang, supported by customer design fabless IC design, but did not get enough support.
CES Semiconductor has announced details of its sources of funding, technology or specific product plans aimed at creating chips for applications such as IoT, automotive networking, artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G, so US observers have speculated that it may Starting with the 40nm to 28nm process, Yuexin has so far received investment from local governments and financial companies, but no fabless chip supplier has yet joined.
Christian Gregor Dieseldorff, director of global fab research at the International Semiconductor Industry Association (SEMI), said there are already 20 fabs under construction in China and plans to build more fabs, saying SEMI is currently tracking the 20 Most of the fab projects are in China, and 70% of them are 300mm fabs.
Schematic of CanSemi fab in Guangzhou (Source: ESM)
Analysts said some of China's plans are still challenged with funding, process technology or ample supply of technicians.
For example, the Yangtze Storage Technology (YMTC) was hyped with plans to build three fabs with a total capacity of 300,000 tablets per month, but SEMI believes that its current capacity at a new plant next to XMC in Wuhan is about 5,000 tablets per month .
Another source, who asked not to be identified, said Cheung Kong's fab technology is on schedule and will make 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory by the end of the year. Samples of the 32-layer components currently manufactured at the XMC plant Allegedly available, but the company did not respond to the news.
Meanwhile, Tsinghua Unigroup, a major investor in Yangtze River Storage Technology, announced plans to build six fabs with the goal of generating a maximum capacity of 300,000 units per month in Nanjing and Chengdu. Coupled with its storage capacity, The goal is to be able to one day produce nearly 1 million wafers a month. The unnamed source said: "In short, it is definitely a rather crazy figure."
The first fab in Nanjing released a year ago by the Ziguang Group started its construction in late last year but its first Chengdu plant has not yet started construction because of the shortage of funds.
In addition, SMIC also partnered with Qualcomm and Imec research institutes to launch technology nodes that support 14nm FinFET for the first time. However, Samsung and TSMC have adopted this process for several years.
China's ambitious plan has never been less, but sometimes it can not be fully realized.Market observer IC Insights recently also predicted that China may not be able to reach the government's goal of 70% of the chip supply by 2022.
IC Industry to create a "cash challenge"
The new fab is one of the major moves by the Chinese government to expand chip production to boost the economy and reduce the cost of chips currently spending more on chips than imported oil.
Billions of dollars of federal-government funds are fiercely competitive, with Chinese provincial governments competing for their share of the federal funds and using their own budget to try to attract investment from technology companies in China and overseas.
Last year, Gartner predicted China could become the largest purchaser of semiconductor capital equipment by 2018. It has now attracted investments from major wafer fabs such as Intel, Samsung, TSMC and Globalfoundries.
IC Insights predicts that China will spend about $ 1 billion to $ 15 billion in fab capital equipment over the next three years, which is about $ 120 billion earmarked for 10% of the industry's public and private funds.
Bill McClean, president of IC Insights, said: "These fabs are built in phases and will not be able to move to the next stage if they only get 50% utilization in phase 1. So far, startups I think it is very difficult to get government money ... It's not as easy as they think. "
For years, Guangzhou officials have been trying to reach an agreement with a state-of-the-art fab, dating back more than two decades, between China Electronics Corp. and STMicroelectronics.
Guangzhou City's technology hub in Shenzhen, where Foxconn has made a number of Apple products in the emerging electronics city of southern China, where Chinese telecom giant Huawei and ZTE also set up large-scale operations stronghold.
Wafer manufacturing plans at YMCA symbolize a new direction of finding funds from clients, without having to rely entirely on the government, but its success remains to be seen.
According to ESMC, 15 companies from the field of chip design, manufacturing and testing, one day prior to the announcement of the CES 12-inch fab project, announced the opening of an operating site in Guangzhou as part of a new local investment fund. Including FPGA supplier Guangdong Gowin Semiconductor.
Over the past year, there have been as many as 24 new announcements of investment in Guangzhou, including Cisco, GE, Huawei, Tencent and ZTE. Other companies.
In July last year, LG Display announced the decision to build a 8.5-generation OLED production line in Guangzhou, and it is estimated that as many as 2.6 million 2,200 x 2,500 pixels of TV screens will be produced from 2020 onwards.
Foxconn also said in March 2017 that it will begin production of 10.5-generation 8K displays in Guangzhou this year, and the company made similar plans in the United States last year.