news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

21st Century Business Herald reporter Zhang Sainan reports from Shanghai

On August 2, AMEC (688012.SH) announced the opening of its industrialization base in Lingang, Shanghai. The base is equipped with advanced production workshops and intelligent three-dimensional warehouses, marking the 20th anniversary of AMEC entering a new stage of development.

In his speech, Yin Zhiyao, founder, chairman and general manager of AMEC, said that AMEC's ​​goal is to become a world-class semiconductor equipment company in terms of scale and competitiveness by 2035.

Yin Zhiyao was born in 1944 and is 80 years old this year. He said emotionally that he has led AMEC for 20 years and looks forward to meeting again in 20 years to celebrate the 40th anniversary of AMEC.

New base opened

At the age of 60, Yin Zhiyao returned to China and founded China Micro Corporation. Starting from a blank sheet of paper in 2004, it became one of the first companies listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in 2019. From an entrepreneurial team of only 15 people at the beginning, it has gradually grown to more than 2,000 employees worldwide today.

AMEC's ​​footprint is also expanding, from a humble office in Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park to a global presence. Currently, AMEC's ​​customers are located in more than 10 countries and regions including mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, and Italy.

The newly opened Lingang industrialization base will become an important production base of AMEC. According to reports, the base covers an area of ​​about 157 acres and a total construction area of ​​about 180,000 square meters. It is equipped with laboratories, clean rooms, production workshops, intelligent three-dimensional warehouses and other facilities, which can realize digital and intelligent management of the entire production process.

It is reported that the Lingang Industrialization Base adopts an advanced factory management system and is equipped with an intelligent three-dimensional warehouse to realize the tracking of manufacturing resources and monitoring of the production process.

A reporter from 21st Century Business Herald visited the base's production workshop and smart warehousing platform on site, and found that the staff had entered into normal large-scale production.

In July 2023, the 140,000-square-meter Nanchang production and R&D base of AMEC was completed and put into use; currently, the AMEC Lingang headquarters and R&D building located on the shore of Dishui Lake is also under construction, which will cover an area of ​​about 100,000 square meters after completion. In the future, the total area of ​​AMEC's ​​production and R&D base will reach about 450,000 square meters.

According to staff, by 2024, the company will have achieved mass production and large-scale repetitive sales of more than 5,000 reaction tables on more than 130 production lines at home and abroad.

Promote localization of equipment

With the rapid development of China's semiconductor equipment industry, AMEC's ​​revenue and net profit have maintained double-digit growth in the past five years. In the first quarter of this year, AMEC's ​​revenue was 1.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 31%; net profit attributable to the parent company was 249 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 9.53%; and non-net profit was 263 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15.40%.

As the leader of China's semiconductor equipment, AMEC has witnessed and led the development and rise of domestic semiconductor equipment. AMEC's ​​main products include semiconductor plasma etching equipment and metal vapor deposition equipment (MOCVD) for LEDs. Among them, plasma etching equipment is the most critical micro-processing equipment besides photolithography machines, and it is the equipment with the most process steps and the most difficult process development.

"The diameter of a hair is 70 microns. Taking a 5-nanometer chip component as an example, the company's micro-processing equipment is equivalent to building a high-rise building at a scale of one 14,000th of a hair." An employee of AMEC introduced it to reporters in this vivid way.

It is understood that relying on the industry's first dual-machine technology for etching equipment, AMEC was the first to propose the concept of "picometer-level" processing accuracy. Its etching accuracy has reached below 100 "picometers", equivalent to one 3.5 millionth of the accuracy of a hair. In addition, the product has the advantages of rich etching application coverage and can meet more than 90% of etching application needs. Its technical capabilities have covered more advanced levels of 5 nanometers and below.

At the 2023 performance briefing held at the beginning of the year, Yin Zhiyao revealed that the company has laid out the fourth largest equipment market - optical inspection equipment. He said that electron beam inspection equipment is an absolute shortcoming of the current integrated circuit industry. This field is one of the most critical semiconductor equipment with the largest market demand in the future, and it will consider involving this field in the future.

It is worth mentioning that on the day the Lingang base was put into use, many key figures in the semiconductor industry came to the scene, including Zhang Rujing, the founder of SMIC, and Chen Nanxiang, the chairman of Yangtze Memory Technologies... They are all "pioneers" in promoting the use of domestic semiconductor equipment.

Zhang Rujing said, "We already have first-class talents in equipment manufacturing. From a global perspective, except for the production of lithography machines, we have basically caught up with other semiconductor equipment. Even if there are still some gaps, the gaps are relatively small." He also encouraged domestic semiconductor equipment companies to "go global" and participate in global competition in overseas markets.