Unimos Microelectronics, a re-invested memory backend service affiliate of China's Tsinghua Unigroup, has recently kicked off volume production at its 3D NAND memory chips packaging and testing lines, marking a great stride by the group toward building sound memory and storage ecosystems.

Unimos Microelectronics was renamed in July 2018 from ChipMos (Shanghai), originally a wholly-owned subsidiary of Taiwan's ChipMos Technologies, after Unigroup acquired a 48% stake in the subsidiary in June 2017 to become the largest shareholder of the joint venture.

Unigroup sources said that Unimos has fared smoothly in shifting its operation focus to memory packaging and testing services. The company started construction of brand-new 3D NAND backend service lines in April 2018, completed installation of clean rooms in May, kicked off trial production in June, finished initial product verification in September, and passed product validations at clients in November.

Unigroup can now provide one-stop backend services for memory products, including 3D NAND (raw NAND, eMMC, UFS, eMCP, TF card), 2D NAND, NOR, DRAM, and SRAM.

The group's memory production arm Yangtze Memory Technology (YMTC) has completed in-house development of 32-layer 3D NAND chips and is set to start mass production at its Wuhan production base in 2019, with construction of its memory plants in Nanjing and Chengdu also underway. In addition, the group has also kicked off construction of an SSD plant in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.

Industry sources said China's market has shown ever-expanding demand for 3D NAND, with the penetration ratio for 3D NAND in enterprise-use SSD products shooting up to 77% in 2018 from 10% in 2015 and the corresponding ratio for consumer SSD surging to 60% from 3%. This has demonstrated the mainstream status of 3D NAND in application to either enterprise or consumer SSDs.

To meet the market demand, Unigroup inked in November 2018 a long-term strategic partnership with China's SSD maker Shenzhen Longsys Electronics and then teamed up in December with Taiwan-based NAND controller chip provider Phison Electronics, to deepen cooperation in memory chip supply chains, product designs and contract production to further expand the group's memory and storage ecosystems.