China’s CXMT says new memory-chip platform enters mass production

Rising memory chip costs are adding to price pressures across India’s consumer electronics market.(Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times)

Chinese DRAM chipmaker CXMT said on Sunday its fifth-generation technology platform had entered mass production, a claimed breakthrough that could help China build a stronger competitor to Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology in the global market for memory chips.

DRAM, ⁠or ​dynamic random-access memory, is the short-term working memory that phones, computers and other devices use to run apps and programs.

The new platform is designed to make more powerful memory chips at lower cost and with less power use. CXMT, which listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market this year, said ​it ​would give electronics makers an additional source of supply for ⁠chips used in smartphones and other devices.

CXMT, China’s leading producer of DRAM, said the new platform packs the tiny structures that store data ‌closer together, allowing more memory to fit on each chip and more individual chips to be made from each silicon wafer.

The Hefei-based memory-chip maker said it had reduced the spacing of key features in the part of the chip that stores data to 11.95 nanometres, or about 12 billionths of a metre.

It achieved this using “quadruple patterning,” a process that repeats several manufacturing steps to produce finer circuit patterns.

“Our process capability is now ⁠on par with the ⁠most advanced mass-produced nodes out there in the industry,” Luo Xiaodong, CXMT’s vice president and head of its marketing centre, said ⁠at the 2026 World Manufacturing ‌Convention in Hefei.

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CXMT unveils two new chips

CXMT also unveiled two ​24-gigabit LPDDR5X products made on the new platform. LPDDR5X is ‌a power-saving type of DRAM used mainly in smartphones and other portable electronics.

The products each hold 50% more data than CXMT’s previous equivalent products and are ‌already in mass production, ​the company said. ​They are ​offered in two package formats for different smartphone and portable-device designs.

CXMT said the platform can produce at least 50% more gross chip dies ​per wafer than its fourth-generation platform, using an 8-gigabit-chip baseline.

That measures ⁠the potential number of chips made from a wafer before defective units are excluded, rather than the proportion that pass final testing.

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CXMT said it developed the platform using computer simulations and ‌joint work with ⁠Chinese chip-equipment makers on critical production steps.

The advance comes as Beijing seeks to reduce reliance on foreign semiconductor technology and US export controls ​since 2022 have restricted China’s access to certain advanced chipmaking equipment and related software.