A chip fab is a long hallway of machines that almost nobody outside the industry can name. One of the few Chinese names on that list is AMEC, and the engineer who built it has spent more than two decades turning a single etcher into a full equipment menu.
Yin Zhiyao (尹志尧) founded AMEC (中微公司, Shanghai stock code 688012) in 2004 after a long career in the United States, including a vice-president role at Applied Materials. The company listed on Shanghai's STAR Market (科创板) in 2019 and started as a specialist in plasma etchers — the tools that carve tiny patterns into silicon wafers.
Key takeaways
- AMEC reported 2025 revenue of 12.39 billion yuan (≈ US$1.73B), up 36.6% year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 2.11 billion yuan (≈ US$295M).
- Its CCP plasma etchers now cover processes from 65 nm down to 3 nm and more advanced nodes.
- As of the end of June 2026, more than 8,800 AMEC reaction chambers were in volume production across 220-plus production lines for over 100 customers.
- The company has developed 54 types of high-end semiconductor equipment, expanding well beyond etching into thin-film, ALD, CMP and metrology.
From one tool to a platform
For years AMEC was known almost entirely for etching. That single focus is now deliberately gone. At the 2026 China International Industry Fair (held in mid-October), the company showed two new high-end tools: the Primo XD-RIE, an extremely high aspect-ratio etcher built for advanced 3D memory, and the Prefima Unicore AM, a 12-inch ALD molybdenum system. Both target the most demanding steps in leading-edge logic and storage chips.
The shift is strategic, not incidental. Yin has described a plan to cover more than 60% of high-end integrated-circuit equipment and more than 70% of advanced-packaging equipment within roughly five years, moving from a component supplier toward a platform company. In 2025 AMEC also moved to acquire Hangzhou Zhonggui, a CMP (chemical mechanical polishing) equipment maker, extending its reach from "dry" to "dry plus wet" process steps. The company says it has filed more than 3,300 patents and now runs development and production bases in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu.
Yin has repeatedly argued that Chinese equipment makers should not copy foreign "standard" tools but pursue differentiated, independently developed technology — a line he returned to at the October industry forum, where he framed the work as a fight for sustained innovation and intellectual-property protection rather than imitation.
Why etching is suddenly the bottleneck
Two trends are lifting demand for Chinese etching and deposition tools at once. First, 3D NAND memory stacks more layers to raise density, which means carving deeper, narrower holes — AMEC's new Primo XD-RIE is aimed squarely at the 70:1 to 90:1 depth-to-width range that this requires. Second, because the most advanced lithography (EUV) is hard to access, fabs lean on multi-patterning: repeating etch and deposition steps to reach finer lines. Every extra pass is another etch and deposition chamber sold.
AMEC's 2025 results reflect that pull. Etching equipment sales reached about 9.83 billion yuan (≈ US$1.37B), up roughly 35%, while thin-film deposition — especially LPCVD — grew far faster, with the company citing roughly 224% growth in that segment. Research and development spending was about 3.74 billion yuan (≈ US$524M), close to 30% of revenue, a ratio the company says is several times the domestic peer average.
The harder read
None of this makes AMEC a finished story. The company still earns the large majority of its revenue from etching, and its newer thin-film, ALD and metrology lines must prove durable, high-margin volume at customer fabs. Competing with Applied Materials, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron on a global scale remains a multi-year climb, and export controls keep reshaping which customers and which nodes are reachable.
What is clear is the role Yin has chosen: not a founder who stepped back, but one still setting technical direction at the company he started 22 years ago. In a sector where most attention goes to the chips themselves, AMEC is a reminder that the machines that make the chips are where self-reliance is actually won or lost.
Honest limitations
This article relies on AMEC's own corporate disclosures and Chinese financial-media reporting of its 2025 annual results; it does not independently audit those figures. Market-share or global-ranking claims about AMEC found in some trade coverage could not be confirmed against a primary source and are omitted. The technical specifications of the Primo XD-RIE and Prefima Unicore AM come from the company's trade-show announcements and were not independently benchmarked. Export-control effects are described in general terms because their precise, current scope changes frequently.
What readers can do now
- If you follow semiconductor supply chains, track AMEC's quarterly equipment mix: a falling etching share paired with rising thin-film and ALD revenue is the cleanest signal that the platform strategy is working.
- For investors, read the R&D intensity (around 30% of revenue) alongside gross margin — high spend that does not convert to customer wins is the risk to watch.
- For non-specialists, the takeaway is simple: advanced chips depend as much on the etchers and depositors as on the design, and China's domestic fabs now have a home-grown option at the leading edge.