Fully homegrown memory chips in mass production in Shenzhen

The first completely homegrown memory chips are currently in mass production in Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province, breaking the foreign technology monopoly and serving as an alternative to imported chips.

Powev Electronic Technology Co, a high-tech storage packaging and testing firm based in Shenzhen, is producing memory chips and Solid-state drives (SSDs) on a mass scale, according to the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily Thursday.

The company’s chip lineup includes the first such products to be wholly domestically produced, with each integrated circuit and all production processes completed within China.

The company’s products including memory chips and SSDs were first released on JD.com in May, and their sales have reached 25,000 on the platform, Zhang Zhe, the company’s deputy general manager, told the Global Times.

“The lineup was developed to resolve a supply bottleneck faced by the domestic IC industry,” said Zhang.

The company said the chips and SSDs are used in personal computers and servers, and at least three domestic PC companies have incorporated the chips in their offerings.

With its products widely used in laptops and PCs, Powev maintains secure cooperation with major system integration companies and computer manufacturers, Zhang said. It also cooperates with some major CPU companies for their products, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Loongson, Phytium Technology’s FT series chips, and Huawei’s Kunpeng chips.

Zhang said the domestic memory chips break a market previously monopolized by US and Korean companies, and can give Chinese businesses more pricing power. Powev’s products can now compete with most middle-end foreign memory chips in price and capacity.