(News) China’s semiconductor equipment industry is booming, and self-sufficiency is reaching 50% by 2025?

According to Technews, China is accelerating its efforts to localize semiconductor production. Among these efforts, semiconductor equipment serves as the foundation of the industry, and its level of localization directly determines the overall autonomy and control of the semiconductor supply chain.

Several reports have recently shown that by 2025, the overall self-sufficiency rate in Chinese semiconductor equipment is expected to reach 50%. The news has attracted a lot of attention from the industry and raised questions: What are the actual progress?

The following provides an overview of the development of a Chinese semiconductor device manufacturer.

China’s progress in self-sufficiency in semiconductor equipment will accelerate

As Technews pointed out, based on information from Semi, China is the world’s largest semiconductor consumer market. Strong market demand has given us great momentum to the development of the semiconductor equipment industry.

In recent years, Chinese semiconductor equipment companies have continued to advance technological breakthroughs. As the Technews report points out, companies such as Naura, AMEC and ACM Research Shanghai have had significant success in technology R&D and market expansion, gradually becoming key players in market competition.

The report shows that as of 2024, China’s self-sufficiency rate for semiconductor devices has risen to 13.6%. Self-sufficiency rates are over double digits in the market for etching, cleaning, photoresist stripping and CMP equipment. Meanwhile, China is still behind the most advanced international standards in the development of lithographic equipment, but continuous progress is being made.

China front-end and back-end semiconductor equipment manufacturers

From a technical classification perspective, semiconductor equipment can be divided into single crystal growth equipment, front-end wafer manufacturing equipment, back-end packages and test equipment, as highlighted in the report.

As mentioned in the report, single crystal growth processes include crystal growth, wafer slices, polishing, and epitaxy. Apart from crystal growth, slices, polishing, and epitaxy are usually classified as front-end equipment. Front-end equipment primarily covers exposure, etching, thin film deposition, cleaning and ion implantation, and includes the entire process from wafer processing to chip formation. Back-end equipment includes wafer dicing, packaging, and test equipment.

This report shows that the world’s top five semiconductor equipment manufacturers, including Applicable Materials, ASML, Tokyo Electronics (TEL), LAM Research and KLA, are all focused on front-end equipment applications.

Development of platform-type equipment manufacturers

Among them, the research on applied materials, Tokyo Electronics, and LAM is a platform type company with multiple sectors, including etching, thin film deposition, cleaning, and ion implantation, and ASML and KLA are specific. He is the leader of the niche segment.

As the report states, Chinese companies such as Naura, AMEC, ACM Research Shanghai and Wanye Enterprises are platform-type equipment manufacturers.

Among the platform-type equipment companies in China, Naura was previously developed and has already achieved scale, making it China’s only fully developed platform-type equipment company. AMEC and ACM studies are in the accelerated stages of growth and reach a specific scale. Wanye Enterprises is still in its early development stage, as the report shows.

Meanwhile, Piotech, Kingsemi, Hwatsing, Changchuan Technology, Jingce Electronics, and Skyverse Technology are specialized semiconductor equipment manufacturers.

According to the report, based on reviews by Trendforce and information from the China Semiconductor Industry Association, China has relatively high self-sufficiency rates in photoresist peeling, cleaning and etching equipment. In the fields of CMP, heat treatment and thin film deposition, China has achieved progress in recent years.

However, as the report points out, China remains relatively weak in metrology, coating and development, lithography and ion implantation equipment.

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(Photo credit: AMEC)