Chinese semiconductor memory giant YMTC is reportedly manufacturing anywhere between 400-500,000 wafers per year of leading-edge NAND memory, all on domestically produced wafers. According to Mayuki Hashimoto, CEO and Chairman of SUMCO, a Japanese company supplying raw silicon ingots and polished wafers, they are seeing a significant business impact stemming from China's growing self-reliance, especially with companies like YMTC producing its own silicon ingots and polished wafers. This has led to SUMCO's decreasing revenue, where the CEO shared some insights about Chinese ambitions. He added that China is producing about one million wafers of silicon per year, most of which are test wafers. This includes test runs from companies like SMIC and its customers, such as T-Head, HiSilicon, and others.

Last year, YMTC, with its Xtacking 4.0 3D NAND flash architecture, was the first company to achieve a 200+ layer count in the 3D NAND space. The company's product, X4-9070, a 232-layer TLC 3D NAND, uses multiple silicon wafers, hence growing its massive consumption of silicon that is projected to reach 500,000 wafers per year. Given that this is all homegrown silicon from ingots to NAND, this is a massive success for Chinese self-reliance efforts but a huge blow to companies that used to supply Chinese firms with raw materials. Although the company uses custom silicon, it still relies on foreign tools, photoresists, and pre-cursors. There are some indications that YMTC is developing its own tools; it is a plan of a broader strategy in the Chinese semiconductor industry to develop every step of the semiconductor manufacturing process. Huawei is also there to develop EUV scanners, and YMTC could help with its memory business, which is in need of a new tool.

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) sources, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) has been plotting to manufacture its advanced 3D NAND flash using locally sourced equipment. As the source notes, YMTC has placed big orders from local equipment makers in a secret project codenamed Wudangshan, named after the Taoist mountain in the company's home province of Hubei. Last year, YTMC announced significant progress towards creating 200+ layer 3D NAND flash before other 3D NAND makers like Micron and SK Hynix. Called X3-9070, the chip is a 232-layer 3D NAND based on the company's advanced Xtacking 3.0 architecture.

As the SCMP finds, YTMC has placed big orders at Beijing-based Naura Technology Group, maker of etching tools and competitor to Lam Research, to manufacture its advanced flash memory. Additionally, YTMC has reportedly asked all its tool suppliers to remove all logos and other marks from equipment to avoid additional US sanctions holding the development back. This significant order block comes after the state invested 7 billion US Dollars into YTMC to boost its production capacity, and we see the company utilizing those resources right away. However, few industry analysts have identified a few "choke points" in YTMC's path to independent manufacturing, as there are still no viable domestic alternatives to US-based tool makers in areas such as metrology tools, where KLA is the dominant player, and lithography tools, where ASML, Nikon, and Canon, are noteworthy. The Wuhan-based Wudangshan project remains secret about dealing with those choke points in the future.

Acer at the 2023 International CES showed off its latest lineup of memory and storage products targeting the DIY PC enthusiast market segment under its high-end Predator brand. Leading the booth is the Vesta II line of DDR5 memory modules featuring a high-end product design, and RGB LED lighting. The one shown to us featured a rather modest DDR5-5200 speed and 2x 16 GB density, but the company assured it is spreading the lineup to higher frequencies. The Pallas II line of performance-segment memory targeting creators, for example, does DDR5-6000.

A star attraction in the booth was the Predator GM7 M.2 NVMe SSD. Built in the M.2-2280 form-factor, the drive features a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 + NVMe 2.0 host interface, and combines a Maxiotech MAP1602 controller with YMTC 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash based on the Xtacking 3.0 architecture. The drive offers sequential transfer speeds of up to 7400 MB/s reads, with up to 6300 MB/s writes, and comes in sizes of 512 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB, priced at USD $49.90, $89.90, and $159.99, respectively. Acer is backing these drives with a 5-year warranty.

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce states that Chinese memory manufacturer YMTC is now at risk of exiting the market for 3D NAND Flash products by 2024 following its formal placement on the Entity List of the US Commerce Department on December 15. From this point forward, the Commerce Department will be reviewing and approving individual transactions related to the exportation, re-exportation, and sales of equipment, technologies, and other related goods from the US to YMTC. With acquisitions of equipment parts and technical support from its US partners becoming very difficult and prolonged, YMTC is going to be severely constrained from raising its bit output. Hence, its foothold on the market for 3D NAND Flash products is expected to weaken as time goes by.

TrendForce points out that without the support of the key equipment providers, YMTC is now facing a huge technical obstacle in the development of its latest 3D NAND Flash technology known as Xtacking 3.0. In particular, raising yield rate for the 128L and 232L processes is going to be extremely challenging for the Chinese memory manufacturer. Taking account of this latest escalation in the US-China trade dispute, TrendForce has further corrected down its projections on YMTC's supply bit growth rate and the total NAND Flash supply bit growth rate for next year. YMTC supply bits were initially forecasted to grow by 60% YoY for 2023. However, there was a massive downward correction that put its growth rate at just 18%. Now, YMTC is forecasted to post a YoY decline of 7%, which is a complete reversal from the earlier projections.

YMTC today at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2022 unveiled its X3-9070 TLC 3D NAND flash powered by Xtacking 3.0 architecture. Since its debut show at FMS 2018, YMTC's Xtacking technology has become a hallmark of the company's vision for innovation, and the approach to hybrid bonding has been widely recognized as one of the key enablers of the industry's future growth. Built out to be a common growth platform that drives value and innovation in the semiconductor ecosystem, YMTC's Xtacking 3.0 architecture opens up a world of opportunities for diversified applications in 5G, AloT, and beyond.

From 1.0 to 3.0, YMTC's Xtacking technology, a heterogeneous 3D integration architecture, has established a proven track record of success, as evidenced by a diverse portfolio of Xtacking NAND-based system solutions, including SATA III, PCIe Gen3 & Gen4 SSDs, as well as eMMC & UFS for mobile and embedded applications, garnering recognition from leading OEMs.

YMTC delivered on its roadmaps to achieve a mass-production 232-layer 3D NAND flash memory, beating entrenched players Kioxia, Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix, to the production 200+ layer feat. The Chinese memory and NAND flash giant announced this memory back in August 2022 as the YMTC X3-9070, along with its new Xtacking 3.0 architecture—a proprietary method by which the company can reliably stack a large number of NAND flash layers. Micron Technology is ready with a 232-layer 3D NAND flash of its own, although it hasn't hit a production ramp, yet. This is an incredible feat considering that YMTC only got into this business in 2016, compared to the other players that each have over two decades of market presence.

YMTC's ramp to 232-layer closely follows its unexpected 2020 feat of a production-grade 128-layer 3D NAND, which was groundbreaking enough to win a supply contract with Apple, before losing it in October 2022, due to political reasons (not technological reasons). The Xtacking 3.0 architecture involves back side source connect (BSSC) for the memory cell wafer, which leads to simpler process and lower cost compared to Xtacking 2.0 (up to 128-layers, which had introduced nickel silicide (NiSi) instead of tungsten silicide (WSi) for better device performance and I/O speed for CMOS wafer. The original Xtacking architecture from YMTC, which it debuted back in 2016, with layer counts going up to 64-layer, relied on cost-effective wafer-to-wafer bonding. The YMTC 232-layer 3D NAND flash should find plenty of takers in the consumer electronics industry, spanning smartphones, consumer storage devices, TVs, and other appliances. The high layer-count has a direct impact on density, which can help designers lower costs by using fewer chips, or increase capacity.

Chinese manufacturer Asgard has announced the company's (and the Chinese market's) first PCIe 4.0 SSD. The AN4 pairs 128 Layer 3D TLC NAND manufactured by YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd) Xtacking 2.0 technology, which uses a two-step manufacturing process wherein both NAND cells and interconnects are manufactured in two separate wafers and then optically fused. The NAND memory is then paired with Innogrit's IG5236 Rainier controller. The AN4 is rated for 7,500 MB/s and 5,500 MB/s sequential read and write speeds and features a "high" TBW endurance rating, though Asgard didn't clarify the exact random performance figures, nor the TBW rating for the SSD. Pricing is similarly up in the air - Asgard has only announced market availability for the 1 TB SSD solution come August, with additional 2 TB and 512 GB capacities being readied to market for a later timeframe.

The manufacturing technology of YMTC results in NAND that's as fast as Micron's latest 192-layer NAND tech, and beats well-established Kioxia's 96-layer technology performance-wise. One Bilibili forum user put the drive through its paces, and discovered that to unlock its full potential, one has to have a system capable of 512 bit maximum payload size (MPS), which is currently only supported by AMD motherboards - maximum Intel MPS currently stands at 256 bit, which "only" enables sequential performance of up to 7,150 MB/s. The user put the AN4 through a variety of tests, including PCMark 10's Drive Performance Consistency Test - a 10 to 20 hours workload marathon that puts more than 23 TB of drives on the SSD. It seems that Chinese manufacturers have achieved parity with the top western manufacturers, meaning there is one more option in the global, high-performance NAND market.

China's plans for world domination include the country slowly retracting itself from its dependency on western companies' technologies, via heavy acceleration of plans for and production of a myriad of semiconductor technologies. One of the more important technologies amongst those due to its relative ease of manufacture and overall market value is, of course, NAND technology. And the days of China being undoubtedly behind other manufacturers' technologies seems to be coming to an end, with the countries' Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) 64-layer Xtacking TLC NAND design already achieving pretty impressive results compared to its mainstream counterparts.

Xtacking technology is expected to disrupt the $52 billion NAND memory market and its big players such as Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Western Digital, and Intel. The technology separates periphery circuits and memory cell operations towards a separate wafer, which allows for increased performance and throughput compared to other designs. Senior technical fellow Jeongdong Choe at Ottawa, Canada-based TechInsights (a company specializing in reverse-engineering semiconductor technology) has told EE Times YMTC's 64-layer, 256 Gb die bit density is 4.41 Gb/mm, which is higher than the Samsung equivalent 256 Gb die at 3.42 Gb/mm.

Mainland Chinese semiconductor firm Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC) formally launched a product that could serve as a technological milestone for the company, a 128-layer 3D QLC NAND flash memory chip. Carrying the product naming series "X2-6070," the chip implements YMTC's XTracking 2.0 memory stacking architecture. This is a particularly big development for the company considering the chip's immediate predecessor is a 64-layer chip based on XTracking 1.0, which entered mass-production as recently as in September 2019, a time when most foreign firms such as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, had moved on to 96-layer mass-production, having announced their 128-layer designs around June 2019. YMTC hence appears to have pole-vaulted 96-layer.

"With the launch of Xtacking 2.0, YMTC is now capable of building a new business ecosystem where our partners can play to their strengths and we can achieve mutually beneficial results," said Grace Gong SVP of sales and marketing at YMTC. "This product will first be applied to consumer-grade solid-state drives and will eventually be extended into enterprise-class servers and data centers in order to meet the diverse data storage needs of the 5G and AI era," Gong added. YMTC, part of the state-owned conglomerate Tsinghua Unigroup, is one of the dozens of beneficiaries of the Chinese government's initiative of localizing cutting-edge electronics technology, and reducing reliance on foreign hardware.

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd (YMTC), a new player in the NAND industry, will be joining Flash Memory Summit this year for the first time, delivering a much-anticipated keynote address to reveal its ground-breaking technology - Xtacking. YMTC is the first Chinese company to take part in the high-entry-barrier NAND flash memory industry with its new architecture for unprecedented performance, higher bit density, and faster time-to-market.

Simon Yang, YMTC CEO, will deliver a keynote address, Unleashing 3D NAND's Potential with an Innovative Architecture, on August 7th, from 3:00 p.m. at the Mission Ballroom in the Santa Clara Convention Center, where he will illustrate how the company's new technology can increase NAND I/O speed up to DRAM DDR4 while delivering industry-leading bit density, marking a quantum leap for the NAND market.