CXMT Brand Guidelines: Hefei’s DRAM Maker, From Innotron to a 2026 STAR Listing

A 2016 startup and a fab in Hefei.

CXMT, short for ChangXin Memory Technologies, is a maker of DRAM, the working memory inside phones and computers, based in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province in eastern China. The company says it was founded in 2016 “as a commercial startup” and that it covers DRAM design, research and development, manufacturing and sales under one roof. Its chips go into mobile phones, PCs, tablets and servers, the company says; TechNode, reporting in July 2026, added automobiles to that list.

The business did not start under its present name. English Wikipedia says it began as Innotron, one of a set of Chinese memory plants set up in 2016, and had taken the Changxin Memory Technologies name by 2019. Chinese Wikipedia traces the company to the same Hefei predecessor, founded in 2016, which was later folded into today’s operating company.

The company’s own history page reads as a list of construction milestones. Work on Fab A in Hefei started in March 2017, and its first phase, Fab A1, was completed in January 2018. An 8Gb DDR4 chip was taped out for manufacturing in July 2018 and tested successfully in May 2019. In September 2019 CXMT announced the chip for mass production at the World Manufacturing Convention, and its first order and first sales followed in November 2019, the company says. English Wikipedia, citing a December 2019 interview with EE Times, says the first fab was then in production making LPDDR4 and DDR4 memory.

Growth came through more fabs. The company says its Fab C project began in June 2020, that a trial production line at Fab C1 in Beijing began operating in January 2022, and that Fab A2 in Hefei was completed in June 2022. Chinese Wikipedia says that by 2026 CXMT ran three 12-inch DRAM fabs across Hefei and Beijing.

One kind of chip, in four families.

CXMT makes one category of product. Its product pages list only DRAM, grouped into four families: LPDDR6, DDR5 chips and modules, LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X, and LPDDR4X. The homepage introduces these under the name of a “G5 Technology Platform”, with a line about redefined limits and refined products.

The range grew in steps. Chinese Wikipedia says CXMT launched its first in-house LPDDR5 low-power chip at the end of 2023, and English Wikipedia says it began selling DDR5 memory around the start of 2025. Chinese Wikipedia also notes that CXMT is often paired with YMTC, the Wuhan maker of NAND flash, as one of the two main pillars of China’s home-grown memory industry, while stressing that their products and technical paths are quite different.

The company is run by its president, Cao Kanyu, who also uses the name Mark Cao. CXMT says he joined in 2017 as executive vice president in charge of DRAM research and development before taking the top job, and that he earlier ran the NAND flash division of NoVoMem, a subsidiary of GigaDevice.

Its corporate language is short and direct. The stated vision is “to become a leading technology-driven core manufacturer in the AI-driven era”, the mission is “empowering intelligent society and enhancing human life through advanced technology”, and the listed values are integrity, a startup mindset, execution power and what the company calls championship. The website’s careers pages ask applicants to help “cowrite the global DRAM history”, and the site keeps a separate media kit and an ESG section with pages on labour rights, supply chain and ethics.

How memory makers present themselves.

Memory chips are hard to show. A finished DRAM or flash die is a sliver of silicon sealed inside a black package, and the companies that make them sell mostly to other manufacturers rather than to the public. So memory makers tend to build their visual identity from the stages around the chip: the wafer, the module, the drive and the place where it all ends up.

The wafer is the most common image. A polished disc covered in a tight grid of identical dies, often lit so that the surface breaks into bands of colour, says “scale” and “precision” without needing a product name. Close-ups follow the chip outward: DRAM modules with rows of packages along a green board, SSD circuit boards with a controller and flash packages side by side, and cross-section diagrams that show memory cells stacked in layers, the shorthand for 3D NAND.

The factory is the second theme. Cleanroom corridors, staff in full-body suits and long rows of wafer-handling equipment appear in annual reports, recruitment pages and listing documents, usually photographed in cool, even light. At the other end of the chain come data-centre racks, banks of servers and drives that show where the memory is put to work.

Trade shows give the category its public stage. Memory and storage makers present new parts at events such as FMS, the Flash Memory Summit, and Computex in Taipei, where stands mix wafer displays, product cases and technical posters. Across these settings the typical register is a clean sans, a cool or dark palette with one bright accent, and diagrams in place of lifestyle photography; the guides in this series look at how each maker works within, or departs from, that pattern.

From state-backed startup to a listed company.

For most of its first decade CXMT was unlisted. Its 2026 prospectus named the issuer ChangXin Technology Group, with the English name CXMT Corporation, and stated that it had no controlling shareholder, English Wikipedia says; Chinese Wikipedia says entities linked to the Hefei city state-asset regulator together hold more than a third of the shares. The holding company filed to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market in December 2025, Chinese Wikipedia says, and its shares began trading on 27 July 2026 under the code 688825, which now sits in the header of the company’s website.

Xinhua reported on the day that it was the largest IPO in the history of the STAR Market, the exchange’s science and technology board, and TechNode described it as the largest mainland semiconductor offering on record, calling CXMT “China’s largest DRAM maker”.

The company has also been named in legal and trade matters. English Wikipedia says the United States defence authorisation act for fiscal 2023, passed in 2022, barred the US federal government from buying or using CXMT chips. In April 2026 the Seoul Central District Court sentenced a former Samsung Electronics researcher to prison under South Korea’s Industrial Technology Protection Act for leaking DRAM process technology to CXMT, Reuters reported in a story carried by Emirates 24|7; he was one of ten people indicted the previous year, and CXMT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For a design guide, CXMT shows how a young chip company builds an identity out of milestones, standard names and factory sites rather than consumer products; compare YMTC and Micron. For this guide we use a wafer teal, graphite and pale silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CXMT’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.