Since August 2016 in China, the joint venture Yangtze River Storage Technology (YRST), which has set itself an ambitious task to create an advanced production of NAND and DRAM memory, began to operate in China. Controlling stake in the joint venture belongs to the holding Tsinghua Unigroup. Another owner of the JV was Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing (XMC). The joint venture manages the XMC plant and is building two new factories focused on processing 300-mm plates. The first line of lines at one of the new plants of the joint venture will begin mass production in 2018.
In the development of the technology of production of multi-layer NAND (3D NAND) company XMC helps the company Spansion. This week, the chairman of the company YRST, Charles Kau (Charles Kau), said that by the end of the year the company will begin to produce samples of 32-layer 3D NAND. Also by the end of the year, the technology of 64-layer flash memory will be developed, which will allow the Chinese to reduce the gap between the current leaders of the industry for up to two years. The start of production of 64-layer 3D NAND promises to begin in 2019. Samsung and Toshiba, we recall, have already started mass production of 64-layer 3D NAND.
All of the above said the chairman of the company YRST voiced during his visit to Taiwan. . For a long time and even now Taiwan has been oriented towards cooperation with Western and South Korean companies that have become technology donors and received in return ready products (DRAM and NAND chips). Now China wants to become independent in this matter, and the rich experience of Taiwanese companies would be useful . In particular, Charles Kau called on Taiwanese colleagues to create joint patent packages, which would help partners to confront world leaders in the memory market.
World leaders and personally the company Micron against such cooperation. Previously, Micron blocked the work of DRAM technology developers in one of UMC's R & D centers in Taiwan. Also, Micron accuses about a hundred of its former employees in Taiwan in the transfer of memory manufacturing technology to the Chinese. All of them are trying to prohibit switching to work in YRST and similarly appointed other newly created Chinese companies.