China's state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup has clinched a deal with the Chongqing municipal government to build its DRAM operations headquarters, R&D and manufacturing facilities in the country's southwestern city, according to industry sources.

Under the deal, Tsinghua Unigroup will set up a 12-inch DRAM manufacturing fab in Chongqing's Liangjiang New Area, with construction to kick off by the end of 2019 and official production set for 2021. The group will develop relevant process technology and carry out trial production at its other memory chip plans in China before transferring mature technology to the Chongqing plant after becoming operational, the sources said.

The group has decided to set up its DRAM operations and R&D headquarters as well as production base in Chongqing mainly seeking to leverage the city's sound semiconductor supply chain and strong industry clustering effect. Chongqing now clusters three major industries of IC, LCD panel and smart devices, and is home to 12 IC designers and three IC foundries, including US-based Alpha & Omega Semiconductor, AT&A from Austria and China's Advanced Silicon Technology.

Besides the planned fab in Chongqing, the group also operates memory chips manufacturing plants in other China cities: Wuhan, Nanjing and Chengdu. Its Yangtze Memory Technology (YMTC), located in Wuhan, designed and produced China's first batch of 3D NAND chips and is set to start volume production of the second-generation 64-layer NAND chips by the end of 2019.

The group's Nanjing plant kicked off construction in September 2018 with a planned monthly capacity of 100,000 3D NAND and DRAM wafers, and its factory in Chengdu is still under construction and will be dedicated to producing 12-inch 3D NAND wafers.

By: DocMemory
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