J. Microelectron. Manuf. 3, 20030203 (2020) doi: 10.33079/jomm.20030203 Editorial Introduction: China's IC industry has been flourishing in recent years, huge market demand together with government investments are the major driving forces for this development. The status and development momentum of the Chinese IC industry also attracted wide interest and attention of international counterparts. A group of domestic IC experts are invited by the JoMM to write a series of articles about China's IC industry, including the history, current status, development, and related government policies. Information in these articles is all from public data from recent years. The purpose of these articles is to enhance mutual understanding between the Chinese domestic IC industry and international IC ecosystem. Current Status of the Integrated Circuit Industry in China ― Overview of the Memory Industry 1. Status of China's Memory Market products, China has a huge demand for memory chips. According to data released by the General In the past years, the Chinese memory chip Administration of Customs of China [2], the total cost market has been occupied by foreign manufacturers. of imported integrated circuits in China reached According to TrendForce statistics [1], the top five 312.058 billion dollars throughout 2018. Among them, global NAND Flash in Q4 2019 are by Samsung the number of memory imports was as high as (36.6%), Kioxia (18.9%), Western Digital (14.2%), 123.083 billion dollars (imports increased by 1188.99% Micron Technology (12.1%) and SK Hynix (9.7%). year-on-year), accounting for 39.4% of total imports. The top five vendors share a total of 91.5% of the Figure 1 shows that in 2018, the global market. In the global DRAM market, it was semiconductor market reached 477.94 billion Dollars, monopolized by 44.1% of Samsung, 28.4% of SK of which the global memory chip market is about 170 Hynix, and 22.0% of Micron Technology. The three billion dollars. China's memory imports accounted for companies share a total of 96.9% of the market. As the 25.8% of the global semiconductor market in 2018, world's largest manufacturer of electronic products and 72.4% of the global memory chip revenue. and significant consumer market for electronic Figure 1. Statistics of China's Memory Import and Export (2007-2018). 1 Current Status of the Integrated Circuit Industry in China ― Overview of the Memory Industry 2. Chinese Memory Companies Toggle DDR, with I/O speed up to 1.4Gbps. However, most NAND suppliers can only provide I/O speed of 2.1 Yangtze Memory Technology Corp. (YMTC) 1.0 Gbps or lower. The Xtacking architecture of YMTC has successfully increased the speed of the I/O In July 2016, Tsinghua Unigroup, National interface to 3Gbps, which is comparable to the I/O Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Hubei speed of DRAM DDR4. Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, and In terms of production capacity, according to the Hubei Science & Technology Investment Group Co., plan, the capacity of 64-layer 3D NAND flash Ltd established YMTC. According to statistics, the memory of Yangtze Storage by the end of 2020 is total investment of YMTC is about 160 billion yuan. expected to increase to 60,000 wafers per month. In Among them, Tsinghua Unigroup accounted for 51.04% 2020, YMTC will skip the 96-layer stack and go of the shares [3]. directly to the 128-layer stack, striving to shorten In December 2016, the national memory base further the gap with companies such as Samsung and with YMTC as the main body officially started Toshiba. construction, including three 3D NAND Flash Fab According to Chen Jiewei, research associate of plants with the most extensive clean room in the world, DRAMeXchange [4], a researcher of Jibang one headquarters R&D building and several other Technology, the Changjiang Storage Chengdu Plant is supporting buildings. It is expected that after the expected to be put into operation in the Q2 2020, project is completed, the total production capacity when it may have a production capacity of 5,000 will reach 300,000 wafers per month, and the annual wafers per month. By the Q4 2020, the production revenue will exceed 10 billion dollars. Relying on the capacity can climb to 20,000 wafers per month. The existing 12-inch advanced integrated circuit current capacity of the Wuhan factory of YMTC is technology research and development and about 20,000 wafers per month. It is expected to reach manufacturing capabilities of Wuhan Xinxin 50,000 wafers per month by the Q4 2020. By then, the Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (XMC), the independent capacity of the entire 3D NAND Flash of Yangtze R&D and international cooperation are carried out in Storage will reach 70,000 wafers per month. It is parallel, YMTC has successfully developed China's already close to Intel's 85,000 wafers per month first 3D NAND flash memory chip in 2017. With the production capacity. However, compared with mass production of 32-layer NAND Flash of YMTC Samsung's production capacity of 470,000 wafers per in 2018, China's flash memory chips have finally month, there is still a considerable gap. It only achieved a breakthrough. However, due to the fact accounts for 4.6% of the global 3D NAND Flash that the technology is quite different from the global production capacity. However, Chen Weiwei expects mainstream technology, it will not affect the market. that as Yangtze Storage's new 3D NAND Flash In contrast, in 2019, YMTC officially announced production capacity continues to increase, it is the mass production of 64-layer 256 Gb TLC 3D expected that by 2023, YMTC's share of global 3D NAND Flash based on the self-developed Xtacking NAND Flash production capacity will increase to architecture, remarkably it can bring competition to 10.8%, in order to catch up with Intel (6.6%) and the current middle- and low-end market. Note that, Micron (10.3%). this flash memory meets the mainstream market application requirements such as solid-state drives and embedded storage. Compared with the 64/72- layer 3D NAND flash memory currently available in the industry, it has higher storage density. This is mainly attributing to the Xtacking architecture independently developed by Yangtze River Storage. At present, NAND flash memory mainly uses two I/O interface standards, in which the first standard refers to Intel/Sony/SK Hynix/Group/Western Digital/Micron's ONFi. The latest ONFi 4.1 Figure 2. 128L QLC 3D NAND. specification released in December last year can deliver I/O interface maximum speed up to 1200MT/s On April 13, 2020, YMTC announced that its (1.2Gbps). The second standard is Samsung/Toshiba's 128-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory (model: X2- J. Microelectron. Manuf. 3, 20030203 (2020) 2 Current Status of the Integrated Circuit Industry in China ― Overview of the Memory Industry 6070) has been successfully developed and has been with an area of 274,000 square meters, will be put into verified on terminal storage products such as SSDs of use in the second half of 2018. multiple controller manufacturers. X2-6070 is the According to the plan, the manufacturing industry's first 128-layer QLC 3D NAND flash technology work of JHICC is mainly carried out by memory with the highest storage density per unit area, UMC. The first phase of the overall JHICC project the highest I/O transfer speed and the highest capacity will invest a total of 5.3 billion US dollars and will be of single NAND flash memory chip. Also released officially put into production in the third quarter of this time are 128-layer 512Gb TLC (3 bit/cell) flash 2018. The monthly capacity of inch wafers is memory chips (model: X2-9060) to meet the needs of expected to reach 60,000 wafers. The company aims different application scenarios to launch a 20-nanometer product finally and plans to Chang Yi, Senior Vice President of Yangtze complete a monthly production capacity of 240,000 Storage Markets and Sales, said: "As a newcomer in wafers by the fourth phase by 2025. the flash memory industry, YMTC has achieved a leap However, due to the litigation between JHICC from 32 layers to 64 layers to 128 layers in just three and Micron, on October 29 local time in the United years. The cohesion of people's sweat is also the result States, the United States included JHICC on the list of of a collaboration between the upstream and entities subject to export control [6]. Two days later, downstream of the global industrial chain. With the UMC also announced a suspension of R&D support advent of the Xtacking 2.0 era, YMTC has the for JHICC. So far, Jinhua, Fujian's DRAM has almost determination, strength, and ability to create a new stagnated. business ecology, so that our partners can fully Use At that time, JHICC had 200 semiconductor their advantages to achieve mutual benefit and win- devices in place and planned to conduct small-scale win." trial production at the end of the year. It was expected As a semiconductor memory enterprise that it would realize volume production at the scale of integrating chip design, process development, wafer several thousand wafers by early 2019. It planned to production and testing, sales and service, YMTC become the first domestic manufacturer of mass- provides advanced storage products and solutions for produced DRAM chips soon. However, due to the U.S. customers worldwide, which are widely used in ban, many related equipment and technology mobile communications, computers, data centers and suppliers stopped supporting.