YMTC preps second Wuhan wafer fab for NAND flash
China’s national champion NAND flash producer Yangtze Memory Technology Co. Ltd. is planning to bring its second wafer fab online in Wuhan by the end of 2022, according to a Nikkei report.
Despite a memory market headed towards saturation and with falling prices YMTC appears to be determined to carry on gaining market share.
The company was founded in 2016 as a subsidiary of China’s Tsinghua Unigroup, which owns 51 percent of the company. It has moved from about 1 percent market share in global NAND production in 2019 to 4.5 percent in 2021.
Ramping market share
The main fab in Wuhan is reportedly capable of 100k wafer starts per month and it is said Fab 2 will be eventually capable of running 200k wafer starts per month. This could help YMTC double its market share.
YMTC successfully brought in 128-layer 3D-NAND flash production at about the same time as other memory companies and this now represents 40 percent of its output. It is reported that YMTC plans to skip the 192-layer generation and move directly to 232 layers.
It was reported in March that Apple was testing NAND flash memory chips from YMTC with a view to including the Chinese company as a supplier for the iPhone 14.
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