YMTC, a subsidiary of mainland China's semiconductor giant UNIGROUP, attended the Flash Memory Summit in Silicon Valley on the 7th. Simon Yang, CEO of YMTC, gave a speech at the conference and announced 32-layer and 64-layer 3D NAND products independently developed by YMTC. According to Simon Yang, the 32-layer product will enter the trial production stage in the second half of 2018.

YMTC revealed that its 64-layer 3D NAND chip has an I/O interface speed of 3 Gbps, which is twice as fast as Samsung's latest V-NAND and three times faster than mainstream 3D NAND. The new product uses X-tacking, a 3D NAND architecture innovation, which speeds up data processing. In addition, the X-tacking architecture allows for maximizing its 3D NAND capacity and minimizing chip size.

YMTC plans to start production at its plant in Wuhan, China, and will build a plant in Nanjing, China, starting to increase production next year. China's NAND market has become an unstoppable trend, and market research institutions predict that NAND prices will continue to decline by 2019.

Korean industry insiders said: "Chinese companies will first seize the market for low-priced products such as computers, and will enter the market for high-priced products such as servers in the future."

South Korea's two major semiconductor manufacturers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, are actively expanding their investment scale and striving to retain talents in response to the rise of Chinese companies. Samsung Electronics started construction of a second production line at the Pyeongtaek Semiconductor Plant in Gyeonggi Province, SK hynix also decided to build a new M16 plant in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, with a planned investment of 15 trillion won.