First Chinese Memories

China’s first domestic NAND chips will be on the market in H2, according to the co-CTO of Yangtze Memories

“We will have built a wide range of system memory products with our own brand for not only personal computers, enterprises storage, cloud computing solutions, but also to high-end smartphones, and to setup boxes, tablets, and other consumer electronics,” Cheng Weihua, Yangtze Memory co-CTO, told  SEMICON China in Shanghai, “we will start to introduce those products in the second half of this year,”

Yangtze, said Cheng, aims “to become the world’s leading integrated device manufacturer.”

The company said it was making 64-layer NAND in Q4 2019 and said it had developed 128-layer devices in April.

Cheng said that Yangtze more than 2,000 patents and taken over 1,600 tech licenses to avoid aby IP disputes.

“We have a good track record in tech development because the company has placed intellectual properties as a top priority,” said Cheng,  “I don’t think the trend to collaborate with global supply chain would be reversible.  No country, and no company in the world could do things all by themselves without any global collaborations.”

Last week, Yangtze started work on a 300,000 wpm, $24 billion plant in Wuhan, which would be able to supply 23% of the current world market.

By the end of 2021, it is expected to have a capacity of 80,000 wpm.