Three major China firms gearing up to enter DRAM market
Yangtze River Storage Technology (YRST), Fujian Jin Hua Integrated Circuit, and a joint venture set up by GigaDevice Semiconductor and the Hefei city government of China's Anhui province, are all gearing up to compete in the DRAM field and targeting to become China's largest DRAM producer, according to industry observers.
YRST is being supported by China's state-backed tech conglomerate Tsinghua Unigroup. YRST is evaluating the possibility of acquiring an existing 12-inch wafer fab or building a brand new one in Nanjing that will be dedicated to producing DRAM and NAND flash chips, the sources indicated.
YRST already has a 12-inch memory fab in Wuhan run by subsidiary Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing (XMC), which is expected to produce China's first homegrown 3D NAND flash devices as early as end-2017, the sources said. YRST would use technology from Cypress (formerly Spansion) to produce 32- and 64-layer 3D NAND chips.
