China’s chip designers are stepping up work on homegrown replacements for ABF film as Ajinomoto reportedly trims shipments to the mainland by roughly 30 percent. The reporting attributes the move to Ajinomoto favoring Japanese customers and established overseas accounts. Those accounts feed the FC-BGA substrates used under Nvidia, AMD and Intel accelerators.
Of the three domestic substitutes named so far, Huazheng New Material’s CBF film is the most advanced. It was developed with the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Electronic Materials, and uses a modified epoxy resin with spherical silica filler, engineered to route around Ajinomoto’s patents rather than reproduce them.
Even if the 30 percent figure is disputed, the supply squeeze is real. Ajinomoto ran ABF production at about 2 million square meters per month at full utilization in Q2, and has committed 25 billion yen, roughly $156M, since 2023 to lift capacity about 50 percent by 2030. A third plant is planned on land in Kani City, Gifu Prefecture. For Chinese AI chipmakers, a tighter ABF spigot adds cost and delay at the worst time, as export controls already complicate access to advanced packaging inputs.
