In September last year, the No. 1 production and power plant of the National Storage Base Project (Phase 1) was capped one month ahead of schedule; now, the chip production machine platform has been relocated 20 days in advance. Zhao Weiguo, Chairman of the Ziguang Group and chairman of the Yangtze River Storage Group, stated that The requirements for the production machine to move into the production environment are very high. They must be placed in a clean room and provide corresponding support. Therefore, the interior of the machine room indicates that the interior of the factory clean room, electrical equipment and other interior decoration has been completed one after another. Capping is more technically more difficult.
9 months construction of the factory, 7 months to implement the machine to move in, construction nodes continue to advance. The national memory base project, once reached the scale of construction of 6,000 people at the same time, day and night fighting. The production machine is moving into the important node, It is understood that The equipment moved in was only the first one. Afterwards, it was necessary to move from various parts of the world into various types of high-precision chip production machines for debugging. The number was more than 2,000 units. After equipment commissioning, it was possible to quantify production chips.
According to the plan, in the fourth quarter of this year, equipment is expected to be put into production. Gao Qiquan, executive vice president of China Unicom Group, executive vice president of Yangtze River Storage, revealed that the volume production this year will be China's first 32-layer three-dimensional NAND flash memory chip successfully developed last year. On April 9th, this chip, which cost US$1 billion and was independently developed by a 1,000-person team for 2 years, won the China Electronics Information Expo (CITE2018) Gold Award. This is the most mainstream in the manufacturing process in China that is close to the international high-end level. The chip, which will hopefully enable China to enter the first echelon of global memory chips, will enhance the status of 'China Core' in the international market.
"But this is only just beginning." Gao Qiquan accepted the visit carefully. He introduced that after mass production of 32-layer three-dimensional NAND flash memory chips, it will not be a very high output. 'More important is to complete the complete accumulation of independent technologies. Not good enough, it will not hard hit production'.
At present, the global memory chip technology is mainly in the hands of Korean, Japanese, and American companies. It belongs to a relatively monopolistic market. In June last year, Samsung announced that it started mass production of 64-layer NAND flash memory. These technologies and products will promote the use of TB. Units of SSDs and mobile phones with 128GB or more flash memory are rapidly gaining popularity.
According to statistics, global sales of flash memory chips exceeded US$50 billion in 2017, a year-on-year increase of 45%, and it is expected to exceed US$100 billion in sales in 2020. More than half of the Chinese market imports, and the memory chips produced independently by Chinese companies are basically blank. In the past three years, the price of global memory chips has been rising.
"The bench is ten years cold." Zhao Weiguo said that the road ahead is still very long and difficult. We must strengthen our confidence and keep our strengths. 'We hope to gain a firm foothold in 5 years. Others can't get us out but real success is needed.' 10 years'.
In an interview with Gao Qiquan, he also stated similarly, 'Catch up with technology in the first five years and increase production in the next five years'. He said that currently Yangtze River Storage has completed independent research and development of 32-layer three-dimensional NAND flash memory chips, and will also put into mass production, but the output is The cost is not enough to affect the market. 'Later advantage is not to go too far, faster, but others are running, still have to spend time to catch up, spend time', Gao Qiquan said, 64-tier flash memory product development It is also rapidly progressing, and will strive to achieve capacity ramp-up and volume production by the end of 2019. In this way, we will be able to shorten the gap with the world's leading manufacturers within two years. 'We hope to use five years or so to approach the world's advanced level'.
