YMTC on a roll with 128-layer flash chips

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co Ltd, a Chinese chip maker, launched its 128-layer flash memory chip on Monday, marking a step forward in the country's efforts to develop homegrown semiconductors and shorten the technological gap with foreign counterparts, analysts said.

The progress also showed that the company's product development schedule was not impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic, especially in Wuhan, Hubei province, where YMTC is located, they said.

YMTC said its 128-layer flash memory 3D NAND chips, a type of high-end nonvolatile memory chip, have passed sample verification on the solid-state drives platform by working with multiple controller partners.

The company said its X2-6070 chip has the highest bit density, and capacity among the currently available 3D NAND flash memory products.

Grace Gong, senior vice-president of marketing and sales at YMTC, said in a statement: "We were able to achieve these results due to the synergy from seamless collaborations with global industry partners, as well as contributions from employees.

"With the launch of Xtacking 2.0, YMTC is now capable of building a new business ecosystem where partners can play to their strengths and achieve mutually beneficial results."

Xtacking is the company's in-house developed chip architecture, and it is the basis for the company's high-end 64-layer flash memory chips, which entered volume production last year.

In its 128-layer line of products, Xtacking has been upgraded to version 2.0, which adds more benefits to flash memory, the company said.

"This product will be first applied to consumer-grade solid-state drives and eventually extended into enterprise-class servers and data centers, in order to meet the diverse data storage needs of the 5G and AI era," Gong added.

Memory chips are widely used in high-end data storage products on electronic devices such as smartphones, personal computers and data servers. China, despite being one of the world's largest manufacturing powerhouses for electronic devices, relies mostly on foreign companies to obtain high-end flash memory chips.

YMTC is a unit of Chinese semiconductor giant Tsinghua Unigroup, and it is part of the Chinese company's key push to reduce heavy reliance on the foreign semiconductor industry amid trade uncertainties.

Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst of Forward Insights, a market research company in flash memory and solid-state drives, said vertical scaling of 3D NAND by increasing the number of layers is becoming progressively more capital-intensive with each generation.

The first phase of YMTC's plant in Wuhan currently can produce 20,000 chips every month, and the number is expected to reach 60,000 by the end of this year and hit 100,000 ultimately when its first phase is in full capacity, a source within YMTC familiar with the matter told China Daily earlier.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Information Consumption Alliance, a telecom industry association, said YMTC is following its schedule of unveiling 128-layer flash memory chip, which indicated that the epidemic did not considerably affect its business.

The company's latest progress came as a string of tech companies in Wuhan are returning to work as the outbreak is under better control in China. At the Wuhan factory of Lenovo Group Ltd, about 10,000 employees are working on the assembly lines of the world's largest personal computer maker, the company said.