Tsinghua Unigroup enters the memory market. It will take 3 to 5 years to develop its own domestic memory chips

Following the announcement of the establishment of the DRAM memory business unit at the end of June, Tsinghua Unigroup signed an investment agreement with the Chongqing Municipal Government at the end of August to build a DRAM business group headquarters and memory chip factory in Chongqing. Construction is expected to start at the end of this year and memory mass production will officially begin in 2021.

Tsinghua Unigroup is another company that has entered the R&D and production of memory chips on a large scale after Hefei Changxin and Fujian Jinhua. In this market, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron account for 95% of the global market share, and the annual output value of more than 100 billion US dollars is almost monopolized by these three companies.

Tsinghua Unigroup's entry into the memory industry is a good thing for Chinese companies to expand their memory market share, but this process is not smooth sailing. According to previous reports, Tsinghua Unigroup also has Xi'an Unigroup Guoxin Semiconductor, which is one of the few companies in China with DDR series memory research and development capabilities. It previously stated that DDR4 memory chips and modules are under development and are planned to be launched on the market next year.

However, Unigroup Guoxin also mentioned that they lack memory chip production capacity and cannot guarantee production capacity. Now Unigroup is investing heavily in Chongqing to build a memory production base to solve the problem of domestic memory production capacity.

However, China did not have the ability and experience to mass-produce DRAM memory before. Building a factory for Tsinghua Unigroup is obviously a process of trial and error. Under the current global situation, it is impossible to obtain mature technology licenses and can only rely on its own research and development.

According to the analysis of the research company, it may take 3 to 5 years for Tsinghua Unigroup to independently develop memory, which means that even if the factory is built in 2021, memory production can only be in small batches. Large-scale production and profitability remain a long-term goal.