SMIC founder Richard Chang and AMEC chairman and CEO Dr. Gerald Yin appeared together on CCTV's Dialogue program on May 17th to make a coordinated case for Chinese chipmakers to give homegrown equipment more production-line trial time, according to DigiTimes.
The strange joint TV appearance came days after Chinese industry figures told Securities Times that the next three to five years will determine whether domestically built tools can move from functional prototypes to equipment that meets the yield, throughput, and uptime demands of volume manufacturing.