(Yicai Global) April 14 -- China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies has launched two new 128-layer flash memory products as it looks to take on the overseas giants that dominate the server and data center sectors.

The Wuhan-based firm released a 1.33 terabyte quad-level cell three-dimensional NAND flash memory chip and a 512 gigabyte triple-level cell flash memory chip yesterday. Both have been tested on end products from multiple controller manufactures and will be mass produced starting around the end of this year to the middle of 2021, the company said in a statement yesterday.

By value, memory products make up about a third of the global semiconductor market, which is highly concentrated among six main players, according to data from market researcher DRAMeXchange. These include Samsung Electronics, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba), Western Digital, Micron Technology, Intel and SK Hynix, who make up 99.5 percent of the sector worldwide.

Revenue in the global sector will likely fall 0.9 percent to USD415.4 billion this year because of Covid-19, while the memory market will grow by 13.9 percent to USD124.7 billion, figures from Gartner show. It expects revenue from NAND flash products to jump 40 percent due to market shortages.

Founded in 2016 by Chinese technology giant Tsinghua Unigroup, Yangtze Memory has quickly made the leap from making 32-layer chips to 128-layer products. It began mass producing 32- and 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips in the third quarter of 2018 and third quarter of last year, and has a 12 inch wafer plant with capacity of 20,000 units per month, which it hopes to boost to 100,000 a month by next year.

Based in the epicenter of Covid-19, Yangtze Memory said last week that the pandemic had had a short-term impact on research progress but the firm was back at work and moving forward faster than before. It does not expect the virus outbreak to have long-term implications.

Editor: Dou Shicong