State-owned China foundry HLMC to build second fab

Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC), the foundry company majority-owned by Shanghai’s local government, is to build a second fab, reports Digitimes.

The fab is expected to start running 28nm wafers in 2018 and be capable, when fully equipped, of running 40k wpm.

HLMC’s Fab 1 is a 35k wpm fab running 65nm, 55nm, 40nm and 28nm processes. The company is said to have taped out a 28nm design for MediaTek.

Six year-old HLMC is majority owned by the Shanghai government with minority stakes held by the foundry companies HuaHong and Grace and various investors.

Customers have included Cypress, Winbond and GigaDevices as well as MediaTek.