IN Brief:
- Lion Micro plans approximately CNY3 billion of investment in a new 300mm silicon-wafer facility in Jiaxing.
- Monthly capacity is designed for 200,000 lightly doped substrate wafers and 120,000 silicon epitaxial wafers.
- The five-year programme would expand upstream material capacity, with customer qualification and utilisation determining its eventual commercial impact.
Hangzhou Lion Microelectronics is planning approximately CNY3 billion of investment in new 300mm silicon-wafer capacity in Jiaxing, extending its existing large-diameter materials operation with additional substrate and epitaxial production.
The company has signed a project investment cooperation framework agreement with the government of Nanhu District covering monthly capacity for 200,000 lightly doped 12-inch silicon substrate wafers and 120,000 12-inch epitaxial wafers. Around CNY2.9 billion of the planned expenditure is allocated to fixed assets.
Construction is expected to run over five years through Lion Micro subsidiary Jinruihong Angxin Microelectronics. Once fully operational, the company expects the site to generate annual output worth more than CNY1.3 billion, although the framework agreement still precedes the final approvals and detailed contracts needed to commit the full investment.
The split between polished substrates and epitaxial wafers gives the project relevance across several semiconductor manufacturing stages. A lightly doped silicon substrate provides the crystalline base on which devices are fabricated, while an epitaxial wafer carries an additional controlled silicon layer grown on the substrate to provide electrical characteristics more closely matched to the final device structure.
Epitaxial material is used in power semiconductors, analogue devices, image sensors, discrete products, and other applications where resistivity, thickness, and dopant concentration within the active layer have to be controlled separately from the bulk wafer. Producing those layers consistently at 300mm requires tight control of deposition uniformity, surface condition, particles, and crystal defects across a large area.
The economics of 300mm production remain straightforward in principle. A larger wafer places more die through each lithography, deposition, etch, inspection, and cleaning step, allowing equipment and cleanroom costs to be spread across greater output. That advantage depends on maintaining yield: poor flatness, excessive particles, crystal defects, or edge losses can quickly erase the benefit of additional wafer area.
Lion Micro is not entering 300mm production from scratch. The company already manufactures 12-inch semiconductor wafers, and its recent financial reporting shows the format becoming a larger part of its materials business. The Jiaxing investment therefore represents additional industrial scale rather than a laboratory move into a new wafer diameter.
That distinction also changes the technical challenge. Expanding an existing process requires more than installing additional crystal-growth, slicing, polishing, cleaning, epitaxy, and inspection equipment. New lines have to reproduce the material characteristics customers have already qualified while operating at higher aggregate volumes and across different production tools.
Wafer qualification can be lengthy because semiconductor manufacturers build process assumptions around the behaviour of their starting material. Crystal defects, oxygen concentration, resistivity, surface roughness, warp, bow, particles, and epitaxial thickness variation can all affect downstream yield. Changing wafer supplier, or even qualifying a new production line from an existing supplier, therefore requires substantial statistical evidence before high-volume orders follow.
The five-year construction timetable gives Lion Micro scope to phase installation and qualification rather than bringing the full proposed output online at once. It also exposes the project to a semiconductor cycle that may look very different by the time later production stages are commissioned.
China has continued to add upstream semiconductor capacity alongside investment in device fabrication and packaging, reducing dependence on imported materials while creating a more competitive domestic supplier base. Silicon wafers are strategically important within that effort because every wafer fab ultimately depends on qualified starting material before any transistor, sensor, or power device can be produced.
Yet additional nominal capacity does not automatically translate into useful supply. Customers still have to approve the material, production equipment has to run at acceptable utilisation, and pricing must support the cost of maintaining crystal-growth and wafer-processing operations. Oversupply at the substrate level can be just as uncomfortable economically as shortages further downstream.
Epitaxial wafers add another layer of exposure because they carry more processing value before reaching the customer. A rejected polished substrate represents lost material and process time; a rejected epitaxial wafer includes the cost of the additional deposition process and associated metrology as well.
For Lion Micro, the Jiaxing programme therefore combines a capacity decision with a qualification problem. The announced figures establish considerable scale — 320,000 wafers a month across the two product groups — but commercial success will depend on how quickly those lines can produce material that customers are willing to qualify and keep qualified.
The project now has a proposed site, investment structure, capacity target, and five-year development window. The more revealing milestones will come later, as individual production lines move through equipment installation, process qualification, customer sampling, and sustained wafer output.
