Shanghai Huahong Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (HHGrace) is currently the second largest foundry house in China in terms of booth revenues and production capacity, and Digitimes Research believes the company is an important indicator of China's development of technology and strategies for 8-inch fabs.
HHGrace was formed by merging Shanghai Huahong NEC and Grace Semiconductor in 2013 and currently has three 8-inch fabs with a total production of 124,000 wafers a month.
HHGrace offers foundry services for embedded flash, discrete components, logic, RF, analog and power management (PWM) chips, EEPROM and NOR flash chips.
HHGrace's foundry applications also include smart cards, connected chips, MCUs, sensors and telematics devices. Based on its current platforms and technology, the foundry house will certainly look for business opportunities in the IoT and wearable device markets, according to Digitimes Research.
During the period from 2015-2017, HHGrace is expected to commit more R&D efforts to scale-down its process nodes for providing general or specialty foundry services for logic, analog and PWM ICs, MEMS chips and embedded non-volatilememory (eNVM) solutions, specially for low-power consumption.
HHGrace and other 8-inch fabs are also to focus on the development specialty process nodes in order to avoid direct competition with 12-inch fabs.
However, production of analog and PWM ICs, discrete components and LCD driver ICs are likely to be the growth drivers for 8-inch fabs in China in the foreseeable future.