Domestic testing only reaches the 28-nanometer level: Jingzhixin bets on 5-8 nanometer technology
A 12-inch wafer has to go through hundreds or even thousands of processes in a wafer fab. After each step including lithography, etching, thin film deposition and ion implantation, relevant personnel need to conduct a visual check. Tiny deviations in particles, pattern defects or critical dimensions may scrap the entire batch of wafers. Metrology and inspection equipment is therefore known as the "eyes" and "ruler" of wafer manufacturing. As process nodes advance further, these "eyes" become more expensive, scarcer and more difficult to manufacture. Now, a company established less than a year ago has positioned itself at the 5-8 nanometer node.
Public industrial and commercial registration information shows that Jingzhixin (Shanghai) Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. was registered in December 2025, with a registered capital of 10 million RMB. Its legal representative is Wang Rongsheng. Its business scope covers the manufacturing and sales of special equipment for semiconductor devices, manufacturing of special electronic equipment, manufacturing and sales of experimental analytical instruments, manufacturing and sales of optical instruments, as well as sectors including integrated circuit chip design and services, software development, and information system integration services. Jingzhixin focuses on the R&D of chip inspection and metrology equipment for 5-8nm process nodes, aiming to build "China's first 5-8nm chip inspection and metrology equipment", provide localized yield control solutions for advanced process production lines, and has recently launched a new round of financing.
Eyes and Ruler: Still an Import-Dominated Business
The yield of chip manufacturing largely depends on how early defects can be detected. According to the sorting of front-end metrology and inspection equipment industry by Zhiyan Consulting, the global semiconductor inspection and metrology equipment market reached 15.22 billion US dollars in 2024, with a year-on-year increase of 18.7%; in the same period, the world's top five enterprises occupied more than 80% of the market share, among which KLA alone had a market share of over 50%, forming a market pattern of "one superpower with multiple strong players". The proportion of domestic supply is significantly lower than the importance of this link in the production line: according to the 2024 China Wafer Inspection Equipment Industry Research Report by LeadLeo Research Institute, the localization rate of China's semiconductor metrology and inspection equipment increased from about 2% in 2020 to about 5% in 2023; calculated by revenue in the industry weekly report of Kaiyuan Securities in November 2024, the localization rate was about 5.5% in 2023; other public reports citing Yole statistics show that the overall localization rate of front-end metrology and inspection equipment was only about 4.2% in 2025. Different institutions have different statistical calibers, and the absolute values are not suitable for direct comparison, but they all point to the same fact: the metrology and inspection equipment on advanced process production lines is still mainly imported.
The demand side is still expanding rapidly. According to statistics from Zhiyan Consulting, the annual compound growth rate of the semiconductor inspection and metrology equipment market in Chinese mainland from 2020 to 2024 was about 30%, reaching 43.8 billion RMB in 2024. The industry review of Aijian Securities in November 2026 cited Yole data, showing that the size of the semiconductor inspection and metrology equipment market in Chinese mainland reached 4.45 billion US dollars in 2025, accounting for about 24% of the global total, with a compound growth rate of 19.5% from 2020 to 2025, and it is expected to increase by 35.9% year-on-year to 6.05 billion US dollars in 2026. The amount of equipment configuration required per unit of production capacity is also rising synchronously: Kaiyuan Securities estimates that the metrology and inspection equipment required for a 12-inch advanced process production line with a monthly output of 10,000 wafers is about 1.7 times that of a mature process production line; Aijian Securities cited the disclosure at KLA's 2026 Investor Day that during two iterations of advanced logic nodes, the number of inspection steps required for each generation increased by about 30% compared with the previous generation, and the inspection scope also expanded from surface defects to buried defects and repetitive defects in EUV lithography.
For domestic equipment manufacturers, this means that demand and thresholds exist at the same time. The value of metrology and inspection equipment must be confirmed by the verification results of the customer's production line, which features long R&D investment cycle, large capital occupation, and once the repurchase decision is made, the machine is not easy to be replaced. These industry characteristics determine that advanced process inspection equipment is not a track that can quickly capture the market with narrative hype in the short term.
What Kind of Difficulty Level is the 5-8 Nanometer Node
From the perspective of technical routes, according to statistics from Zhiyan Consulting, optical technology accounts for more than 80% of the global front-end metrology and inspection equipment market in 2024, and electron beam technology accounts for about 14%. Guohai Securities summarized the trade-off between these two routes in its industry research report in January 2024: optical inspection has fast speed and no contact, but its inspection sensitivity at advanced nodes is limited; electron beam inspection has higher accuracy, but slower rate and higher equipment cost. When the line width advances to 5 nanometers and below, EUV lithography and multi-patterning processes bring more complex defect forms, and the three-dimensional device structure raises the requirements for inspection dimensions. Constrained by the wavelength of the light source, traditional optical inspection has insufficient detection capability for sub-nanometer defects. Therefore, electron beam metrology and inspection with sub-nanometer resolution is regarded by the industry as the core means of advanced process yield control, and image recognition algorithms are widely used to improve the efficiency of defect classification and detection.
This link is also a key target of export control. The Dutch government announced new national export control regulations on January 15, 2025, expanding licensing requirements for advanced semiconductor production equipment from April 1, 2025. CITIC Securities sorted out in its research report in January 2025 that this round of control involves inspection equipment with accuracy no more than 21 nanometers (including equipment using light sources with wavelength less than 400 nanometers, resolution less than 1.65 nanometers, two or more electron beam sources, and cold field emission electron beam sources), as well as equipment used to measure wafer alignment accuracy after development or etching, which are mainly applied to advanced process nodes. The increased difficulty in obtaining advanced node inspection equipment further raises the priority of domestic supply issues.
A more direct reference comes from the shipping capacity itself. The 2024 China Wafer Inspection Equipment Industry Research Report released by LeadLeo Research Institute and Sullivan in May 2024 pointed out that at that time, domestic wafer inspection equipment manufacturers could only mass-produce and ship products for 28nm and above processes, and products for processes below 28nm were still in R&D and verification; products of overseas leading manufacturers can generally cover processes below 2Xnm, and KLA's patterned wafer defect inspection equipment Surfscan SP7XP has been applied to 5nm and below processes. The in-depth industry report of Zhongyuan Securities in October 2026 cited data from Jiwei Consulting, stating that metrology and inspection equipment is still one of the links with the lowest localization rate in Chinese mainland, with the proportion ranging from 5% to 10%. This means that pushing the inspection capability to 5-8nm is not a simple upgrade of existing products, but crossing a whole set of technical and engineering thresholds that have not yet undergone mass production verification.
The progress of domestic pioneers can give the difficulty reference of this challenge. Taking Dongfang Jingyuan, which laid out the electron beam metrology and inspection field early, as an example, according to its Sci-Tech Innovation Board prospectus (draft for application) and public reports such as Shanghai Securities News, the company was founded in 2014. Its EBI equipment is the first domestically developed electron beam defect inspection equipment that has been successfully developed and passed industrial verification, and has been put into mass production in production lines for more than five years. Its products cover four categories: CD-SEM, EBI, DR-SEM and HV-SEM, and it owns 201 authorized invention patents as of December 31, 2025. On September 28, 2026, the cumulative shipment of its nanometer-level electron beam metrology and inspection equipment exceeded 100 units; the reply to the inquiry of the application draft shows that from May to June 2026, the company obtained a bulk order with a total tax-exclusive amount of 153 million RMB from a leading domestic memory customer (referred to as "Customer G" in the application draft). Even at this stage, its computational lithography software is only applied to mass production at 14nm and above process nodes in the field of logic chip manufacturing, and related products for more advanced nodes such as 7nm and 5nm are still under verification at the customer's site. In terms of finance, Dongfang Jingyuan's operating revenue from 2023 to 2025 was 191 million RMB, 375 million RMB and 318 million RMB respectively, and its net profit was -239 million RMB, -150 million RMB and -477 million RMB respectively.
The public progress of the other two local manufacturers also falls on the word "verification". According to the research report of Aijian Securities in November 2026, the bright field equipment of Jingce Electronics has passed the acceptance of the 28nm production line and has been repeatedly delivered to the 14nm production line, and some film thickness, optical critical dimension (OCD) and electron beam equipment have passed the acceptance of the 7nm production line. On December 26, 2025, Zhongke Feice released its first electron beam critical dimension metrology equipment MAGNOLIA EBM-600, which the company said is mainly oriented to the critical process in the manufacturing of 1Xnm advanced logic and memory chips. Putting these records together, we can see that there is still no verifiable mass production delivery case of domestic inspection equipment for the 5-8nm node so far — this is not only the reason why Jingzhixin chose this node, but also the threshold it must cross.
Established for Less Than a Year: What Has Been Explained and What Has Not Been Explained
The situation of Jingzhixin needs to be understood in this context. The company concentrates its R&D resources on inspection and metrology equipment for 5-8nm process nodes, hoping to provide a localized choice that balances inspection sensitivity and throughput efficiency for advanced process production lines; according to the industrial and commercial registration information, the company's business covers the manufacturing and sales of special equipment for semiconductor devices, experimental analytical instruments, optical instruments, and lays out integrated circuit chip design and services, software development and information system integration services, presenting a business structure of coordinated equipment and software; the report also clarifies that the specific technical scheme and key parameters of Jingzhixin are yet to be further disclosed with the results of production line verification.
As of press time, there is no information about Jingzhixin's product release, equipment shipment, customer introduction or production line verification passing in public channels, no published patents with the company as the applicant have been retrieved, and the educational background and industrial experience of the founder and core team have not been seen in public reports. For an equipment start-up with a registered capital of 10 million RMB and established for less than a year, these gaps do not constitute a negative judgment. They more indicate that the project is still in the earliest stage from industrial and commercial registration to R&D and industrial verification. But in this track, prototype shipment, customer production line verification and bulk orders are almost the only verifiable evaluation methods.
Another verifiable public information comes from related enterprises. According to public reports such as Tianyancha and Hexun Finance, Wang Rongsheng, who has the same name as the legal representative of Jingzhixin, also serves as the legal representative of Jiangsu Fansheng Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. The latter has a registered capital of 20 million RMB, and its business scope highly overlaps with Jingzhixin in terms of manufacturing and sales of special equipment for semiconductor devices, optical instrument manufacturing, experimental analytical instrument manufacturing, integrated circuit chip design and services, etc. There is no public explanation for the division of labor, resource allocation and intellectual property ownership between the two entities, which are the items that investors need to verify item by item in due diligence.
Financing Destination and the Next Verifiable Nodes
In terms of business model, Jingzhixin takes the R&D and manufacturing of inspection and metrology equipment as the core, supporting software and technical services, facing the yield management needs of integrated circuit manufacturing and advanced packaging links. Its target customers include integrated circuit manufacturers, advanced packaging production lines and scientific research institutions; the company is carrying out a new round of financing, and plans to use the raised funds for product R&D and industrial verification. The financing round, amount and investors have not been disclosed to the public.
The regional and policy environment provides external conditions. The Three-Year Action Plan of Shanghai to Further Promote the Construction of a Quality Strong City (Hu Fu Ban Fa [2026] No. 24) issued by the General Office of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government on August 26, 2026 and released in September proposes to accelerate the construction of the National Integrated Circuit Micro-Nano Testing Equipment Industrial Metrology and Testing Center (Shanghai) and other institutions, and forward-looking layout of advanced measurement technologies in fields such as precision inspection of high-end equipment. Jingzhixin is registered in Shanghai, which is one of the domestic regions with the most dense integrated circuit manufacturing and equipment industrial chains. Whether it can transform location and supporting resources into verifiable technology and order progress still needs to be answered by subsequent disclosures.
For this project, the nodes worthy of tracking next are clear: whether the technical scheme and key parameters can be officially disclosed, whether the first prototype can be shipped, whether the customer production line verification can be launched and its results, and whether the company can enter the stage of jointly defining the process window with wafer fabs. The window for domestic substitution of advanced process inspection and metrology equipment does exist, and the market space figures have been repeatedly calculated by many institutions; whether this window can be transformed into products and orders of a company established for less than a year will finally be answered by the verification results on the production line.