Traditional strengths power chip-sector forays

long been a weak link constraining China's advanced chip manufacturing. Zhu said the main bottleneck in developing domestically produced CMP slurries lies in the supply of abrasive particles, a key upstream raw material that accounts for as much as 70 percent of total slurry costs.

The global supply of such materials, however, has long been dominated by a handful of international companies, which have erected formidable market barriers and created closed supply-chain ecosystems through close joint-development arrangements and exclusive agreements, he noted.

"This structural imbalance has long left domestic CMP slurry producers with formulas but without the essential abrasive particles needed to put them into production, making it difficult to achieve stable mass production and independently improve high-performance products," Zhu added.

Against this backdrop, Dinglong moved into the CMP slurry business in 2021, targeting research and development toward four core abrasives: high-purity silica, ultra-pure silica, alumina and ceria.

Zhu said producing these abrasive particles in-house could give researchers more control over particle size and surface properties, allowing materials to be adjusted for a customer's process.

To date, the company has overcome technical barriers in alumina abrasive particles, a field previously dominated by a single global supplier. Its product has entered mass production at a major domestic manufacturer, with monthly deliveries now running into hundreds of drums, the company said. It has also completed the development of a ceria-based CMP slurry for more advanced memory chips, which is undergoing a key qualification process before being introduced into mass production.

Notably, one of the company's proprietary CMP slurries had even outperformed an incumbent supplier's product in a key defect-control metric. "It delivered better scratch control than the incumbent product, helping us secure repeat orders from customers," Zhu said.

Dinglong said it has invested more than 1.4 billion yuan in slurry and abrasive-particle operations. In Xiantao, Hubei province, it built annual capacity for 10,000 metric tons of particles and 20,000 tons of slurry.

Dinglong's transformation story is part of a wider change in China's traditional manufacturing sector. As artificial intelligence development lifts demand for chips, fine-chemical producers, equipment makers and even a consumer outdoor brand are using old skills or acquired technology to find a place in the semiconductor supply chain.