China foundry CanSemi Technology has recently kicked off its third-phase expansion plan at its 12-inch wafer fab in Guangzhou, southern China with total investment of CNY16.25 billion (US$2.355 billion), aiming to build specialty process platform for analog chips for industrial and automotive applications.
After the third-phase facility construction is completed in 2024, CanSemi's monthly capacity will increase by 40,000 pieces to a total of 120,000 in 2025, with production processes to advance to 55-40nm and 22nm.
The company started first-phase production in December 2017 adopting 180-190nm processes for MCUs, power management ICs, analog chips and discrete power chips, and the second-phase capacity entered volume production in the first half of 2022, progressing to 90-55nm process nodes.
CanSemi said its third-phase capacity will be mainly for producing power electronics, server chips, power devices for 5G infrastructure and automotive applications and signal chain ICs in addition to MCUs, PMICs and image sensor chips, aiming to help build a semiconductor cluster in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) in line with China's 14th Five-Year Plan.
Its president and CEO Chen Wei has said that there are many noted tech players operating in the GBA, such as handset vendors Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and ZTE, smart household appliances brands Midea, TCL and Gree, car vendors BYD, XPeng Motors and Guangzhou Automobile, as well as new energy startups, forming a huge application market for chip products. The entire GBA currently accounts for 50% of chip consumption in China, according to Chen.
