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China Moves to Contend in Chip Making
Chinese chip-making ambitions are getting a $24 billion boost, as a new project breaks ground
By EVA DOU in Beijing and DON CLARK in San Francisco
Updated March 24, 2016 7:43 p.m. ET
21 COMMENTS
BEIJING—China is putting $24 billion toward building a world-class semiconductor industry, exploiting a partnership with a U.S. company for the production of memory chips used in a wide array of electronic devices.
On Monday, XMC, a contract chip maker owned by the Chinese government, will break ground in the city of Wuhan for the first Chinese-owned plant dedicated to producing the most widely used memory chips, an XMC spokesman said.
XMC last year partnered with U.S. flash-memory maker Spansion Inc. to co-develop next-generation chip technologies. Spansion later joined with Cypress Semiconductor Corp. as part of an all-stock merger valued at $5 billion.
Chinese companies currently account for minimal production of memory chips, which are used to store data in electronic gadgets. Semiconductors in general have become a major target for Chinese policy makers as they promote a shift from low-end manufacturing to more-advanced sectors
Beijing, which has established a national fund to support the semiconductor sector, also has pushed technological self-sufficiency following Edward Snowden’s revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency exploited backdoors in some U.S. technology products to spy on foreign governments. Memory chips are not a primary target for hackers, but theoretically could be hacked, according to cybersecurity experts.
China raised alarms in Washington last year when state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup attempted to invest in multiple U.S. chip makers. The move by the fast-emerging Chinese technology company has come to naught so far.
XMC’s factory will produce both flash memory and computer memory chips known as dynamic random access memory, or DRAM. It will be largely financed by China’s national semiconductor fund as well as the provincial government, said the XMC spokesman.
Cypress, based in San Jose, Calif., with revenue of $1.6 billion last year, has long been known for a class of memory chips called SRAMS, for static random access memory. By merging with Spansion, a former joint venture of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd., Cypress gained expertise in the flash-memory technology used in smartphones and other products.
The XMC spokesman said the $24 billion will be invested in three stages, with an initial factory focusing on NAND flash-memory production, a second plant concentrating on DRAM chips and the third stage devoted to facilities for suppliers. XMC and Spansion in a joint statement about their partnership last year said the first product will be available in 2017.
A Cypress spokesman had no immediate comment Thursday.
“It’s a signature breakthrough,” said Sean Yang, research director of TrendForce’s DRAMeXchange, a memory-sector research firm based in Taiwan. “It’s a milestone for a Chinese company to actually start on this path.”
XMC, whose Chinese name translates as Wuhan New Chip Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Co., was set up by the Hubei provincial government and its capital city Wuhan in 2006 as a “major strategic investment project” with a more than $1.5 billion investment, according to a government website. The Hubei Province Technology Investment Corp. is its sole owner. It primarily makes a different variation of flash memory called NOR. Many of its top executives previously worked at China’s main chip contract manufacturer, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.
While XMC’s latest project has the backing of the central government, many analysts are skeptical about the Chinese company’s ambitions. The chip maker is relatively obscure, and its move comes against a backdrop of limited success for Chinese efforts to build a competitive semiconductor industry.
XMC is starting years behind industry leaders like Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co., and memory chips are a punishing business for also-rans due to heavy investment costs and the need for scale. Taiwan has poured billions of dollars into DRAM production for more than a decade without success, resulting in many companies being bought out by their rivals.
“I’m not optimistic” about XMC’s chances, said Mark Newman, a managing director at Bernstein Research. “XMC has very little technology in memory. They will be years behind incumbents.”
Some foreign companies have agreed to build advanced memory plants in China, although such investment might not satisfy Beijing’s desire to develop its own technology. Samsung began production at a memory chip plant in Xian, China, in April, while Intel Corp. said in October that it would introduce new chip-making machines at an existing facility in Dalian, China.
China’s interest in memory chips became apparent last year with Tsinghua Unigroup’s investment efforts. The state-run company attempted to acquire U.S. memory-chip maker Micron Technology Inc. and invest in Western Digital Corp., which itself was seeking to acquire flash-memory maker Sandisk Corp. Neither deal panned out, in part due to fears of U.S. government opposition.
XMC aims to produce a next-generation flash memory chip called 3D NAND, which is expected to become the mainstream data storage for computing devices in coming years. Smartphones and other gadgets currently use so-called flat NAND for storage—a “parking lot” compared to 3D NAND’s “multi-story deck,” as XMC Chief Executive Simon Yang has described it.
Samsung has pioneered an approach of stacking layers to make the chips more efficient, and others have followed, including Intel and Micron in the U.S. Bernstein Research’s Mr. Newman said Samsung is the only 3D NAND maker producing in volume, though as the chips become cheaper to produce than regular NAND this year there will be rapid adoption.
There are varying proficiencies in the technology; while Samsung is at 64 layers, analysts say XMC is at 8. An XMC spokesman declined to disclose the number of layers.
“As long as we start now, it is very likely for us to catch up and to be in the top tier,” Hong Feng, XMC’s chief operation officer, said in a speech in November, according to the company’s website.
—Yang Jie contributed to this article.
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