SMIC Brand Guidelines: Shanghai’s 2000 Foundry, Two Listings & the Entity List

A foundry incorporated offshore and built in Pudong.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, shortened to SMIC, was founded on 3 April 2000. It is headquartered in Shanghai but, according to English and Chinese Wikipedia, was incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Chinese Wikipedia names Richard Chang (Zhang Rujing), who had previously worked at TSMC, as one of its founders.

Its Chinese name is 中芯国际 (Zhongxin Guoji); in English the company uses the short form SMIC on its website and in its stock-exchange listings.

SMIC grew quickly. English Wikipedia says it built a wholly owned plant in Shanghai, acquired a Motorola plant in Tianjin, and then began a wholly owned plant in Beijing. It also managed projects in Chengdu and Wuhan where, Wikipedia says, local governments bore the capital cost of the plants while SMIC ran them — a reversal of the usual pattern in China, in which government built, operated and then handed over industrial projects. In September 2003 it raised funding from investors including Walden International, Oak Investment Partners and Temasek.

In 2004 SMIC listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Chinese Wikipedia says; it also carried a New York listing, which it applied to withdraw voluntarily in May 2019, citing low trading volumes and the administrative cost of keeping it, English Wikipedia reports. On 16 July 2020 it listed on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Chinese Wikipedia says, so that its shares now trade in Hong Kong and Shanghai. English Wikipedia names the state-owned Datang Telecom Group and the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund among its major shareholders.

From 0.35 micron to FinFET.

SMIC calls itself “one of the leading foundries in the world” and says it provides foundry and technology services on 8-inch and 12-inch wafers, with fabrication plants in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Shenzhen, and marketing and customer-service offices in the United States, Europe, Japan and Taiwan. Chinese Wikipedia lists the kinds of chips it makes: logic, mixed-signal and RF, high-voltage, system-on-chip, flash and EEPROM memory, image sensors, power management and MEMS among them.

Its process range runs from older nodes to current ones. English Wikipedia gives it as 350 nm to 7 nm. SMIC announced volume production of 14 nm FinFET chips on 14 November 2019, English Wikipedia says, and its N+1 and N+2 processes followed. Chinese Wikipedia says its Shenzhen fab began production at the end of 2014, the same month Qualcomm said it would make its 28 nm Snapdragon 410 at SMIC. English Wikipedia lists customers including Huawei, Qualcomm, Broadcom and Texas Instruments, and both Wikipedias describe SMIC as the world’s third-largest contract chip maker as of 2024. A 2015 joint venture with Huawei, Qualcomm and the Belgian research centre imec set up a research and development company in Shanghai. In 2016 SMIC took a majority stake in Ningbo Semiconductor International, a business developing analog and specialty processes for high-voltage, radio-frequency and optoelectronic chips, English Wikipedia says.

SMIC has also been through long litigation. TSMC sued SMIC over alleged misappropriation of trade secrets; a first round ended in 2005, English Wikipedia says. In a statement dated 10 November 2009, SMIC said that a California jury had returned a verdict against it on 4 November 2009 and that the two companies had agreed on 9 November to settle all pending lawsuits, including SMIC’s own case in Beijing.

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 licence requirement from Washington in 2020.

The defining event of SMIC’s recent history came in December 2020. On 18 December 2020 the US Commerce Department added SMIC to the Entity List, Light Reading reported that day. Quoting the government’s press release, it said the designation “limits SMIC’s ability to acquire certain U.S. technology by requiring U.S. exporters to apply for a license to sell to the company.” The same batch of additions included the drone maker DJI. English Wikipedia adds that earlier, in September and October 2020, US suppliers had been told they needed export licences for some American equipment and materials going to SMIC.

Other changes in the company’s structure came around the same time. In May 2020 the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund and the Shanghai Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund invested in SMIC, English Wikipedia says, and the STAR Market listing followed that July. The company has since set up further joint ventures with state funds to expand capacity, English Wikipedia reports.

Its manufacturing work continued under those rules. English Wikipedia says SMIC began shipping 7 nm chips in 2021, and that the Kirin 9000s processor in Huawei’s Mate 60 phone, launched in September 2023, was made by SMIC on that technology. In December 2025, according to English Wikipedia, the analysis firm TechInsights said its teardown of the Kirin 9030 chip in Huawei’s Mate 80 Pro Max showed it was made on SMIC’s N+3 process, a development of its 7 nm-class process.

For a design guide, SMIC shows how an abbreviation can carry a company through two stock markets, a long patent fight and life under export controls. Compare Hua Hong, another Shanghai foundry, and TSMC, its former opponent in court. For this guide we use a deep teal, a lamp amber and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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