ST tips Hua Hong deal to support ‘China-for-China’ strategy
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European chip giant STMicroelectronics NV has revealed it is transferring its 40nm embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM) CMOS logic process to foundry Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd. (Shanghai, China) as part of a ‘China-for-China’ strategy.
Hua Hong, sometimes known as HH Grace, is China’s second largest foundry after Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC). The manufacturing process technology transfer will see 40nm STM32 microcontrollers being manufactured at Hua Hong’s 300mm-diameter wafer fab in Wuxi as a foundry service by late 2025, ST said.
The move is intended to allow seamless second-sourcing of ST’s microcontrollers duplicating capability it has at Crolles, France. This will stimulate improved MCU sales in China said Reme El-Ouazzane, president of the microcontrollers business group at ST, during the company’s ‘Capital Markets Day’ held in Paris, last week.
“We have been, we are and will continue to see a decoupling of the supply chain in years to come. And this is why close to 18-months ago we took the strategic decision to enable our eNVM 40nm generation to be manufactured in China end-to-end,” said El-Ouazzane. This includes die manufacturing, packaging and testing all taking place within the Chinese mainland.
“We are using the exact same mask set to produce the wafers in Crolles or – moving forward – in China, at HH Grace, the partner we have selected for this initiative,” he added.
The Capital Markets day, where detailed presentations were made to financial analysts, came shortly after ST had published disappointing financial results including a drop in microcontroller sales of about 43.4 percent year-on-year.
The STM32 “made in china” game plan is intended to grow the local customer base by 50 percent over the next five years, El-Ouazzane said. “We intend to be the most Chinese of the non-Chinese MCU vendors. He added that the dual-sourcing would help both Chinese and Western customers sell equipment and subsystems into and outside China.
No mention of RISC-V
El-Ouazzane did not address the fact that STMicroelectronics does not have a RISC-V microcontroller in its product lineup with STM32 microcontrollers being based on Cortex-M cores from Arm Ltd. This is despite the fact that ST recently joined the Quintaris RISC-V consortium and Chinese customers purchasing RISC-V microcontrollers from local suppliers GigaDevice Semiconductor (Beijing, China) and Espressif Systems (Shanghai, China).
ST’s senior management was asked during a Q&A session of the meeting how ST intellectual property would be protected during and after the transfer of process technoogy and designs.
El-Ouazzane said that the technology was being carefully deployed with much use of encrypted data files. He added that Hua Hong already has an embedded flash non-volatile memory process on 40nm CMOS. “We are not accelerating something they are already having. But using our process [for ST products] is much more efficient for many reasons.”
El-Ouazzane stressed during his presentation: “We are not talking about designing our product twice; against our own PDK [physical design kit] and then against the Chinese foundry’s PDK. That would be woefully inefficient.”
Fabio Gualandris, in charge of quality, manufacturing and technology at ST, added that testing of ICs coming off the production line is an essential part of delivery to customers and that ST’s test routines are developed elsewhere and would be brought to China and deployed at a separate location away from the fab and that is under ST’s total control.
Not PCM but following SiC footsteps
ST has embedded phase change memory as a digital logic option on 28nm CMOS and 18nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator and is one of very few companies to offer this but, at least for now, this is not part of the technology transfer.
ST already has a share in a joint venture 200mm wafer fab in Chongqing, China, with Sanan Optoelectronics for silicon carbide (SiC) devices.
That fab was intended to use Sanan supplied wafers and ST’s process technology exclusively to produce power devices for ST in support of Chinese demand for car electrification and industrial power and energy applications.
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