Hua Hong Brand Guidelines: Shanghai’s Project 909 Foundry, NEC & a 2023 STAR Listing

A state chip-plant project in Pudong.

Hua Hong began as a state project. On 29 March 1996 China’s State Council approved the construction of a large semiconductor plant in Shanghai’s Pudong district, and on 9 April 1996 a new company, Shanghai Hua Hong Microelectronics, was chartered to carry it out, the company’s then president told Solid State Technology in an interview the magazine published in May 1997. The plan was known as Project 909. The magazine named China Electronics Corporation and Shanghai ED Holding as partners, with a government loan guarantee, and reported that a foreign partner was still being chosen to contribute process technology.

The first targets, as Solid State Technology reported them, were a half-micron CMOS process on eight-inch wafers, with a first phase of 6,000 wafer starts a month. The article placed the project among the priority developments of the Pudong zone, alongside joint ventures with foreign electronics companies.

English Wikipedia says the foreign partner became NEC: in 1997 Hua Hong and NEC formed a joint venture, Hua Hong NEC, to make DRAM memory chips for NEC. The venture phased out DRAM in 2003 and became a pure-play foundry, a company that makes chips designed by others. Chinese Wikipedia adds that in 1999 Hua Hong developed card chips that were used in Shanghai’s public transport card and its social security card.

A second line ran alongside. English Wikipedia says Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing was set up in Shanghai in December 2000 as a pure-play foundry, and that in 2011 Hua Hong NEC and Grace merged to form Shanghai Huahong Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing. The name appears both as “Hua Hong” and as “Huahong”; the listed company is Hua Hong Semiconductor Limited, incorporated in Hong Kong, according to its stock-exchange filings.

Eight-inch fabs, twelve-inch lines.

Hua Hong is a contract manufacturer: it does not sell chips under its own name but makes wafers for chip companies. English Wikipedia describes three 200 mm fabs in Shanghai, at Jinqiao and Zhangjiang; two 300 mm fabs at Zhangjiang and Kangqiao run through Shanghai Huali Microelectronics, known as HLMC; and a 300 mm fab, Fab 7, in the national high-tech zone of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, where operation began in 2019. It gives Huali’s most advanced processes as 28 and 22 nanometres, and TrendForce reported in April 2026 that Huali’s website lists those processes for its Fab 6 in Shanghai.

Much of the work is in specialty processes rather than the smallest nodes. In March 2026 TrendForce, citing Reuters and a release from STMicroelectronics, reported that the European chipmaker had begun shipping STM32 microcontroller wafers made in China through Huahong. ST described the arrangement as part of a collaboration of about fifteen years and said the wafers use the same 40 nm embedded non-volatile memory technology and quality standards as its own fabs; the transfer of that process to Huahong had been announced in 2024. According to the Chinese tech site ijiwei, as quoted by TrendForce, local production was to start with the STM32H7 series, followed by the H5 and C5 series.

The company has two stock-market listings. English Wikipedia says it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2014. Its yuan-denominated shares then began trading on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange on 7 August 2023, under the code 688347, according to its announcement to the Hong Kong exchange. The Global Times reported the debut that day, calling Hua Hong China’s second-largest chip foundry and the offering the largest in the mainland A-share market so far that year, and the third-largest in the STAR Market’s history after SMIC in 2020 and BeiGene in 2021.

On industry rankings, TrendForce placed Hua Hong sixth among the world’s foundries by revenue in the third quarter of 2025, in a report published in January 2026.

How foundries present themselves.

Contract chip makers sell a service rather than a product with their own name on it. The chips they make leave the plant under their customers’ names, so a foundry’s identity has to be built from the things it can show: the wafer, the cleanroom, the fab and the people who run it.

The wafer is the usual starting point. Foundry photographs often show a finished wafer held up to the light, its grid of chips throwing back a rainbow sheen, or a stack of wafers in a carrier ready for the next step. Close-ups of patterned silicon give a company a recognisable image without revealing any customer’s design.

Inside the fab, the pictures follow a familiar pattern: engineers in full-body cleanroom suits, often called bunny suits, standing at tools under the yellow light used in lithography areas; long, bright corridors lined with equipment; and overhead transport systems carrying wafer pods along tracks in the ceiling. From outside, aerial shots of fab campuses, with their long, low buildings and utility plants, stand in for scale and capacity.

Foundries also present themselves at trade shows and conferences, such as the SEMICON exhibitions held in several regions, as well as through their own technology events for customers. Their names usually travel as abbreviations or short forms, and their written materials lean on process names, node figures and fab locations. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it makes wafers — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A group drawing its fabs together.

The group has been gathering its manufacturing under the listed company. On 31 December 2025 Hua Hong Semiconductor announced a plan to acquire about 97.5% of Shanghai Huali Microelectronics through a share issue, TrendForce reported on 2 January 2026, citing Commercial Times and Shanghai securities newspapers. Hua Hong already held 2.5%, and the sellers included Hua Hong Group and three chip-investment funds. The deal would bring Huali’s 65/55 nm and 40 nm logic and specialty processes into the listed company; it was announced in December 2025 and had not been reported as completed at the time of writing.

Hua Hong has also been named in United States export controls. On 29 April 2026 TrendForce reported, citing Reuters and unnamed sources, that the US Department of Commerce had sent so-called “is-informed” letters to the equipment makers Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA, setting new restrictions on tools and materials bound for two Hua Hong plants: Fab 6 in Shanghai and a site called Fab 8a, reported to be still under construction. The report said US officials believed the plants could be used to make advanced chips, and noted that Hua Hong might replace affected equipment with tools from other suppliers.

The company’s public face is that of an industrial supplier. Its customers’ chips go out under their own brands, so the Hua Hong name appears mainly on fabs, in stock-exchange filings and in the trade press. Its history runs from a single state-approved fab in Pudong to a group of eight-inch and twelve-inch plants in Shanghai and Wuxi, two listings and a long list of partners, from NEC in the 1990s to STMicroelectronics today.

For a design guide, Hua Hong shows how a state industrial project becomes a listed contract manufacturer whose name sits behind other companies’ products. Compare SMIC, the other large Shanghai foundry, and UMC, an older contract chipmaker. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a wafer silver and a jade green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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