Founded in 2006, CXMT announced late last year that it had started production of the country’s first LPDDR5 memory chips, the current mainstream mobile DRAM in the industry, suitable for high-end smartphones. Chinese smartphone makers such as Xiaomi and Transsion have completed verifications of CXMT’s mobile DRAM chips, according to the company. Industry leaders started producing such chips in around 2021.
This advancement puts CXMT just behind top U.S. memory chipmaker Micron and SK Hynix in terms of technology, and ahead of Taiwan’s Nanya Technology, which focuses more on the specialty market rather than mass consumer electronics business. However, CXMT had less than 1% of the global market for DRAMs in 2023, while the three dominant players — Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — controlled more than 97%.
HBM production, meanwhile, is dominated by the two world’s biggest DRAM chipmakers, SK Hynix and Samsung, which together controlled more than 92% of the global market in 2023, according to Trendforce. Micron, which had about a 4% to 6% share, aims to enlarge its HBM presence.
Producing HBM not only requires high-quality DRAM production capability but also extensive chip packaging techniques to link those chips together. China does not yet have local chipmakers that can produce HBM chips to accelerate AI computing.
Brady Wang, a semiconductor analyst with Counterpoint, told Nikkei Asia that China wants to achieve self-sufficiency in HBM but faces many challenges…Read More