By Kate Yuan

(JW Insights) Jun 12 -- China’s IC design house Montage Technology (澜起科技) plans to complete the development of the first generation of MXC and CKD chips for mass-production by the end of this year based on customer feedback, the company said during a recent session of the institutional investors’ Q&A.

Founded in 2004 and listed on the STAR market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2019, Shanghai-based Montage Technology provides high-performance and low-power IC solutions for cloud computing and data center markets. It has two major product lines - interconnection chips and Jintide® server platform.

The company has steadily increased scientists and technicians since listing, with 641 employees at the end of 2022, of which 73% were R&D personnel, totaling 468. The increased R&D staff mainly focus on new products, including AI chips, PCIe Retimer chips, and MXC chips.

As for AI chips, Montage stated that the company had taped out the engineering sample of the first generation of AI chips at the end of 2022, and is currently conducting internal testing and verification work.

In terms of demand for PCIe5.0 Retimers, the company believes that its demand is promising in the medium and long term driven at the continuous doubling of the PCIe data transfer rate. However, the mainstream CPUs that support PCIe5.0 Retimer chips have not been on the market for long, and it will take time to build the PCIe5.0 ecosystem.

Montage is the second company in the world to mass-produce PCIe5.0/CXL2.0 Retimer chips. Its PCIe5.0 Retimer chip has low latency, which is important for high-speed signal chain transmission and CXL applications.

Montage operates in branch offices in Kunshan, Beijing, Xi'an, Macau, the US, and South Korea.