China now makes advanced memory chips without the machines it was banned from buying
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "China now makes advanced memory chips without the machines it was banned from buying")
China now makes advanced memory chips without the machines it was banned from buying Photograph: (AFP)
China's CXMT announced that its fifth-generation DRAM has entered mass production at an 11.95-nanometre class, using a workaround for the advanced lithography machines it is barred from importing. The company says two new mobile-memory products are already in Chinese flagship phones, and its global market share has crossed 10 per cent — the first crack in a decade in the three incumbents' near-total hold.
China's largest memory-chip maker, CXMT, said this week that its fifth-generation DRAM has entered mass production — and the way it got there matters more than the chip itself.
The platform reaches an active-area dimension of 11.95 nanometres, a class of memory chip that normally depends on the most advanced lithography machines in the world. Those machines, made using extreme ultraviolet light, are exactly what export controls bar China from buying.
The Workaround
CXMT did it without them.
Instead of a single pass with an EUV machine, the company used a technique called quadruple patterning — printing the pattern in multiple careful passes with older, permitted equipment to reach a resolution the equipment was not designed to hit on its own. It is slower and more complex, and it works.
That is the headline for anyone tracking the chip war: a key milestone was reached by routing around the restriction rather than being stopped by it.
Trending Stories
)
)
)
&im=FitAndFill=(700,400))
)
)
)
&im=FitAndFill=(700,400))
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
&im=FitAndFill=(700,400))
)
)
)
&im=FitAndFill=(700,400))
)
What They Are Shipping
This is not a lab demonstration. CXMT announced two 24-gigabit LPDDR5X mobile-memory products — the kind of memory that goes into phones — and said they are already integrated into mainstream flagship Chinese smartphones.
The company also says the new process yields at least 50 per cent more usable chips per silicon wafer than its previous generation, which is the figure that decides whether a chip is a science project or a business.
The Number That Signals A Shift
The most consequential claim is about market share. CXMT says its share of the global DRAM market has crossed 10 per cent.
That sounds modest until you see what it breaks. For more than a decade, three companies — Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — have between them held more than 90 per cent of the world's DRAM. CXMT crossing 10 per cent means that grip has slipped below 90 for the first time in that period. A market that was effectively a three-way lock now has a fourth serious player, and that player is Chinese.
The Case For Caution
Several qualifiers belong on this, and they are not minor.
The claims are CXMT's own, made at a domestic industry event, and independent verification of the yield and share figures will take time. Quadruple patterning is real but carries costs the company has an incentive not to dwell on — lower throughput and, potentially, thinner margins than an EUV-based competitor. And a 24Gb LPDDR5X part, while genuinely competitive, is not the leading edge of what Samsung and SK Hynix can build. China has closed a gap, not erased it.
But the direction is unambiguous, and it is the direction export controls were designed to prevent.
What To Watch
Whether independent teardowns of the flagship phones confirm the chips and their specifications. Whether CXMT can hold or grow past 10 per cent, or whether yield and cost pressures cap it there. And how the incumbents and Western policymakers respond to a restriction that has demonstrably been engineered around, rather than merely evaded on paper.
The chip war has always assumed that denying the best machines would keep China a generation behind. This is evidence that the assumption has a workaround.
