By Kate Yuan

Guangzhou, the capital city of southern China’s Guangdong Province, is playing a more vital role in the province’s semiconductor industry as it has begun to comprehensively execute building a stronger IC industry strategy, JW Insights reported.

The province has two National-level IC Design Industrialization Bases and Guangzhou is one of them. For the province’s goal to be among the top three cities in China's IC industry, Guangzhou is highly important.

Guangzhou shows obvious advantages in IC manufacturing. In recent years, the city has built the only 12-inch wafer production line with mass production capability in Guangdong Province. It has leading enterprises in the chip design sectors. The strength in packaging and testing, and materials continues to develop.

A government plan of Guangdong Province for cultivating strategic IC industry clusters between 2021-2025 pointed out to form an industry pattern with cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai as the cores, driving the coordinated development of the whole province including cities like Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, and Huizhou.

The plan called for promoting IC manufacturing with special features and advanced processes, and covering the whole industry chain from design, manufacturing to packaging and testing.

Guangzhou has become home to many major semiconductor projects in the past three years with excellent performance in the third-generation semiconductor and IGBT fields.

Cansemi Technology (粤芯半导体) owns the only 300mm fab capable of mass production in the province. The first phase operated with full capacity in December 2020. The second phase will build 90-55nm high-end analog process production lines with a total investment of RMB6.5 billion ($975 million).

ZhiCheng Semiconductor Materials (志橙半导体) is another project in  SiC material R&D and manufacturing center. It is a subsidiary of Shenzhen ZhiCheng Semiconductor Materials, the only high-tech enterprise in China that mass-produces SiC-coated graphite bases for semiconductor epitaxy.

PCB manufacturer Fastprint (兴森科技) announced on February 8 that it would set up a subsidiary in Guangzhou to build an intelligent manufacturing and R&D base for FCBGA packaging substrate with a monthly production capacity of 20 million in two phases. The factory will solve the bottleneck technology problems for chip localization with a total investment of RMB 6 billion ($900 million).

Summit Crystal Semiconductor (南砂晶圆) landed its headquarter in Guangzhou in 2019 with a total investment of RMB900 million ($135 million). It focuses on the R&D and production of 4-inch and 6-inch SiC substrates and epitaxial wafers.