China makes key progress in closing mobile memory chip gap with South Korea, US as tech war rages
- CXMT said on Wednesday that it has produced China’s first lower-power Double Data Rate 5 DRAM chip, used in mobile devices like smartphones
- Breakthrough comes at a time when China is reporting slow but steady progress in semiconductor development and manufacturing technologies
A leading Chinese semiconductor company has made the country’s first new generation of advanced mobile memory chips, achieving key progress in narrowing the gap with its South Korean and US rivals.
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) said in a statement on its website on Wednesday that it has produced China’s first lower power Double Data Rate 5 (LPDDR5) dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip, a new generation of memory chip that was first introduced by South Korea’s Samsung Electronics in 2018.
The breakthrough, which was achieved amid stepped-up US sanctions to hamper China’s development in advanced chip manufacturing, will enable China to cut reliance on imported products, which are used in electronic gadgets such as mobile phones and laptops.
According to Hefei-based CXMT, one of its products, the 12-gigabyte (GB) version that packs 8 dies each with a capacity of 12 gigabits (Gb), has already been validated by Chinese smartphone makers including Xiaomi and Transsion.
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The LPDDR5 memory chip breakthrough comes at a time when China is reporting slow but steady progress in semiconductor development and manufacturing technologies, even though the country has been denied access to crucial high-end lithography systems from Dutch firm ASML, as well as some Japanese suppliers.
Among recent breakthroughs, Huawei Technologies surprised the world by launching its Mate 60 Pro smartphone powered by a locally made advanced chip.
Third-party teardown reports concluded that the chip was probably produced by China’s top chip foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, using existing equipment.
China’s central processing unit developer Loongson, which has been trying to develop its own chips for decades, announced a 3A6000 chip on Tuesday, which state media claimed matched the performance of Intel CPUs from 2020.
CXMT said the new memory chip delivers a 50 per cent improvement in data transfer speed and capacity over its previous low-power DDR4X, while reducing power consumption by 30 per cent. CXMT said the chip will “diversify its product offerings and further expand its presence” in the growing mobile devices market.
Founded in 2016, CXMT represents China’s best hope to catch up with South Korean memory chip giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and US-based Micron Technology, in the global DRAM market.
CMXT did not reveal what process it used to manufacture the new chip.
In October, the US Bureau of Industry and Security set an even higher export bar on a slew of gear needed for key chip manufacturing, including lithography, etching, deposition, implant and cleaning, doubling down on its efforts to cap China’s logic chipmaking ability at 14-nanometre, DRAM fabrication at 18-nm half pitch and 3D NAND at 128 layers.
“CXMT still faces an uphill battle in ramping up production yields and being competitive in both price and quality compared to similar products on the market made by South Korean DRAM makers,” said Brady Wang, an associate director with research firm Counterpoint, adding that the technology used to produce the chip might not be as advanced to stay within the red lines set by the US.
Samsung unveiled the industry’s first 8-Gb LPDDR5 chip in 2018 and updated it to a 16-Gb LPDDR5X chip based on the 14-nm node in 2021, offering data processing speeds of up to 8,500 megabits per second, which is more than 1.3 times faster than the previous generation.
SK Hynix started mass production of its LPDDR5 mobile DRAM in March 2021, while Micron announced its LPDDR5 chips in early 2020, which it said would be used in Xiaomi’s Mi 10 smartphone.
