CXMT Puts an 11.95-Nanometre DRAM Platform Into Production

ChangXin Memory Technologies said on Sunday 20 September 2026 that its fifth-generation DRAM platform, which the company calls G5, has entered mass production. Reuters reported from Beijing the same day that CXMT has reduced the spacing of the features that store data to 11.95 nanometres, about 12 billionths of a metre, using quadruple patterning, a technique that repeats several manufacturing steps to draw finer circuit patterns.

The announcement came at the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei, the eastern Chinese city where CXMT is based. DRAM is the working memory that phones, computers and servers use to run software. CXMT is China's largest producer of it, and Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology supply most of the rest of the world.

The number CXMT did not publish

CXMT said the platform can produce at least 50% more gross chip dies per wafer than its fourth-generation platform, measured against an 8-gigabit baseline. Reuters attached the qualifier that matters: gross dies count the chips a wafer could yield before defective units are excluded, not the proportion that passes final testing. Yield decides whether a memory process makes money, and the company gave no figure for it.

The first products on the platform are two 24-gigabit LPDDR5X chips, the low-power memory used in handsets. Both are in mass production and are offered in 496-ball and 245-ball packages for mid-range to high-end smartphones and portable electronics, CXMT told the Global Times on 20 September. Each holds 50% more data than the company's previous equivalent part. CXMT also said it built the platform using computer simulations and joint work with Chinese chip-equipment makers on critical production steps, which is the sentence Washington will read twice.

An $8.6 billion listing behind it

CXMT began trading on Shanghai's STAR Market on 27 July 2026 after selling 6.69 billion shares at 8.66 yuan each, raising 57.92 billion yuan, about $8.6 billion, in what Reuters reported was Asia's largest initial public offering of the year to that point. The shares rose 466% on the first day, Reuters reported, taking CXMT to the top of China's market by valuation. The company said the proceeds would fund memory wafer production and research.

The advance lands while Beijing is pushing to reduce reliance on foreign semiconductor technology and while US export controls, in place since 2022, restrict Chinese access to certain advanced chipmaking equipment and the software that drives it. Quadruple patterning is the route to fine dimensions that does not require the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines those controls keep out. It reaches them by repeating steps, which costs throughput and usually costs yield.

The honest reading is that CXMT has matched its rivals on the dimension it chose to publish and has left the expensive part undisclosed. Against the sceptical case, the company is shipping: the LPDDR5X parts are in production now, not sampling. What nobody outside Hefei can check is the wafer cost per working die, and until a teardown or a customer's own qualification data puts a number on it, 11.95 nanometres remains a vendor measurement of a vendor process.