China's Toolmakers Fill Out the Chain as SiCarrier Ships in Volume and NAURA Buys Hybrid Bonding

At this year's WESEMIBAY exhibition, Shenzhen-backed and Huawei-linked SiCarrier said all of its semiconductor equipment products have entered mass production and are already in use at multiple Chinese wafer fabs. The company showed two broad product families — process equipment spanning diffusion and thin-film processing, and inspection and metrology systems covering optical inspection and optical metrology. Specific customer names, installed unit counts and per-model production volumes remain unconfirmed, so the claim of full-line mass production is still a company statement rather than an independently audited figure.

The product roadmap is widening into the most restricted categories. SiCarrier's brochure revealed two previously unseen tools: PMI, codenamed Liupan Mountain, for photomask defect inspection, and mEBI, codenamed Jinggang Mountain, for AI-driven nanoscale wafer defect detection. Subsidiary Qiyunfang is extending its electronic design automation portfolio beyond the schematic-capture and printed circuit board tools launched last year toward a fuller design toolchain; its current tools still stop short of chip-level EDA for integrated circuit design, verification and physical layout, where research is preliminary and no clear product roadmap exists. Adoption is scaling though: the Economic Observer reports more than 100 enterprise customers, with engineers using the tools rising from 20,000 last year to 50,000.

Another subsidiary, Long Sight, drew attention with a 90GHz ultra-high-speed real-time oscilloscope that has entered commercial use, with Huawei and other Chinese companies and research institutions among adopters and demand said to be outrunning production capacity. At 90GHz of bandwidth the instrument ranks second globally and marks a breakthrough in a category where Western export restrictions bite above 60GHz. The company also introduced a 65GHz optical sampling oscilloscope for testing 1.6T optical modules and single-lane 200G interconnects, a 110GHz spectrum analyzer for 6G research, and 67GHz and 110GHz vector network analyzers.

The most strategically loaded move came from NAURA. China's largest semiconductor equipment maker plans to acquire a hybrid bonding specialist for RMB 405 million, according to ETNews and Yicai, as it chases the advanced packaging technologies that HBM and chiplet integration depend on. That sits inside a wider national push: TrendForce reported this month that China spent more than $13 billion stockpiling ASML deep-ultraviolet tools across 2024 and 2025, and separately that a 90%-domestic extreme-ultraviolet light source prototype has been unveiled with mass production still three to five years away.