Zhenzhen Equipment has completed its Pre-A round of financing, filling the domestic supply gap of high-end thin film deposition equipment.

Thin film deposition equipment is one of the three core pieces of equipment for semiconductor manufacturing, directly affecting the performance and yield of chips. For a long time, the domestic high-end thin film deposition equipment market has been dominated by overseas manufacturers, with prominent problems of restricted supply. Hefei Zhizhen Precision Equipment Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zhizhen Equipment"), founded in 2021, is trying to change this situation.

Core Pain Point: Supply Gap of High-end Thin Film Deposition Equipment

In semiconductor manufacturing, the precision of thin film deposition directly determines the electrical performance and reliability of chips. As the process evolves to 7nm and below nodes, the requirement for thin film thickness control precision has approached the atomic level from the nanometer level. However, China has long faced supply bottlenecks in the field of high-end thin film deposition equipment, with relevant equipment relying on imports, and prominent problems such as long delivery cycles and slow after-sales response.

CHENG Houyi, founder of Zhizhen Equipment, participated in the national major scientific research instrument development project during his doctoral stage, and led the team to develop the first domestic magnetron sputtering equipment with single atomic layer precision in 2021. After the principle prototype was certified by the national expert group, the team officially founded Zhizhen Equipment in the same year.

Solutions

The core product of Zhizhen Equipment is high-precision Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) equipment, covering multiple technical routes such as magnetron sputtering, electron beam evaporation, pulsed laser deposition, and molecular beam epitaxy. The equipment can achieve a thin film thickness control precision of 0.1 nanometer level, with thin film uniformity better than ±2%, and the core indicators reach the international first-class level.

At the level of key components, the team has achieved completely independent R&D on the three core components of magnetron sputtering cathode, high and low temperature sample stage, and electrostatic chuck, and the localization rate of the whole machine's parts reaches 80%-90%. The equipment covers the thin film preparation requirements of 4 to 12-inch wafers, and has built a two-wheel-driven product matrix of "scientific research level + industrial level".

Commercialization Progress

Customers of Zhizhen Equipment have covered universities and scientific research institutes such as Tsinghua University and University of Science and Technology of China. On the industrial side, the 12-inch thin film deposition system developed by the company has been successfully introduced into the mass production lines of leading domestic semiconductor enterprises for key thin film deposition. In June 2025, the Hangzhou production base of Zhizhen Equipment was officially put into operation, further enhancing the company's R&D and manufacturing capabilities in the field of large-size thin film deposition equipment.

Team Background

The core R&D team of Zhizhen Equipment is composed of doctors and masters from universities such as Beihang University and University of Science and Technology of China. Dr. CHENG Houyi, the founder, was selected into the Postdoctoral Innovation Talent Support Program (only 15 people in the corresponding discipline nationwide in this batch) and Hefei Leading Talent Program in 2023, and selected into Anhui "Jianghuai Talent Program" in 2025.

The company has successively been rated as a National High-tech Enterprise and Anhui Specialized, Refined, Differential and Innovative Small and Medium-sized Enterprise. Its products won the first prize of Technical Invention of China Instrument and Control Society, were selected as the first set of major technical equipment in Anhui Province, and passed the SEMI S2/S8 international semiconductor equipment safety certification and ISO9001 quality management system certification.

Market Space

According to forecasts from industry institutions, the global semiconductor equipment market size will exceed hundreds of billions of US dollars in 2025, of which thin film deposition equipment accounts for about 15%. The technological breakthrough of Zhizhen Equipment fills the domestic supply gap of high-end thin film deposition equipment, and is expected to provide core equipment support for advanced chip manufacturing, new storage, compound semiconductors and other fields.