Fujian Jinhua returns to view after years in the shadows, but its climb in DRAM is still unfinished
Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. Ltd., once seen as one of China’s three major memory projects alongside Yangtze Memory Technologies and ChangXin Memory Technologies, is back in focus after years of disruption. The company was hit by a U.S. export blacklist and criminal charges just as its DRAM production line was coming together, bringing progress to a halt and pushing it out of the public eye for years. That legal overhang began to lift at the end of 2023, when Micron Technology reached a global settlement with Fujian Jinhua and both sides withdrew lawsuits worldwide. On Feb. 27, 2024, a federal court in San Francisco ruled that prosecutors had failed to prove Jinhua stole Micron trade secrets. The decision cleared the company of the charges that had defined much of its recent history. The article traces Jinhua’s rise from a state-backed strategic project launched in Jinjiang in 2016, its early technology partnership with United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), the central role of executive Chen Zhengkun, and the impact of years of sanctions on its production roadmap. It also places the company inside the economics of the DRAM industry, where scale, capital intensity, yield management and intellectual property disputes have long shaped the global pecking order. Jinhua is still far behind larger Chinese peers. Its 12-inch fab is producing about 40,000 wafers a month, with expansion to 60,000 planned for 2026, and the company remains on the U.S. entity list. But with local state backing, a niche DRAM focus and more than 1,007 related patents, it has not dropped out of the race.








