GoKawiilChina’s Yangtze Memory Technologies is expected to start operations at its Phase 3 Wuhan fab late this year as the first leading-edge memory plant built to comply with Beijing's unwritten requirement that new Chinese fabs source at least half their equipment from domestic suppliers.
Three sources familiar with the plans told Reuters that more than 50% of Phase 3's tooling has been sourced inside China, that the company aims to add two more fabs of equivalent scale on top of the Phase 3 plant, and that the latter two are not yet committed to specific dates or locations. Phase 3 alone will reach 50,000 wafers per month by 2027 and 100,000 wafers per month at full capacity, doubling YMTC's current 200,000 wafers per month of combined capacity at its first two Wuhan fabs.
50% Chinese tooling
It was reported in late December that Chinese authorities have begun rejecting state approval for new fab construction unless applicants can prove through procurement tenders that at least half their equipment will be Chinese-made. While this rule isn’t published in any formal regulation, officials have told applicants that 50% is a baseline, not a target, with the long-term objective being exclusively domestic wafer fab rules.
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Applications below the threshold are typically rejected, with waivers granted only for advanced production lines where domestic alternatives don’t yet exist, and YMTC’s Phase 3 is now understood to be the first leading-edge memory project that’ll clear that bar. The two follow-on fabs YMTC has now told Reuters it wants to build will need to clear it again, twice, before they can break ground.
(Image credit: YMTC)
It’s obvious why YMTC will be the first to launch a fab with a majority of Chinese tooling: 3D NAND. This scales vertically rather than horizontally, which shifts the manufacturing bottleneck away from lithography (the area where China's domestic toolchain is weakest) and toward high-aspect-ratio etch, deposition, and wafer bonding (where it’s strongest).
Each new generation of 3D NAND adds layers rather than shrinking features so that the same lithography node can support 128, 232, or 300+ layer stacks, provided the etch tools can cleanly cut channel holes through 7-to-10-micron dielectric stacks.
In China, it’s Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC) that provides these tools. Its Primo HD-RIE dielectric etch platform, launched in 2015, was designed for high-aspect-ratio contact applications and was qualified for 6nm flash production a decade ago. AMEC has been working on 3D NAND etch ever since.
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