Beijing -- Let’s face it. China’s IC industry still lacks its own superstars – equivalent to Intel, Qualcomm or Broadcom in the West – in terms of the scale, reach and quality these brands possess on the global market.
To belabor the point, how many U.S. design engineers can name, say, the top 10 Chinese chip vendors destined to become their fierce competitors in three years from now? The question is tough because Chinese fabless companies, while growing fast, are still small. Many also remain faceless.
In contrast, a Chinese executive based in Beijing, speaking with ee Times, rattled off
Spreadtrum,
RDA Microelectronics, GalaxyCore and GigaDevice as his “top four” picks among local fabless companies likely to become key players in the smartphone IC ecosystem. The executive, heading up a U.S.-based chip company’s R&D team, believes that will happen not within the decade, but in just a few years.
Is he right?
EE Times has talked to several movers and shakers in China’s semiconductor industry in recent weeks. While our investigation is still in progress, we’ll be reporting our ongoing findings in a two-part series. First, we examine the state of the Chinese fabless industry -- covering how they’ve gotten to where they are today. In part two, we discuss what Chinese semiconductor companies must do in order to cross the chasm – from local heroes in China to power players on the global stage.
On one hand, some multinationals like Synopsys (EDA vendor), VeriSilicon (“Design-Lite” service company) and ARM (IP supplier) are well positioned to leverage local engineering resources to respond to Chinese fabless companies’ always pressing (and almost impatient) need to get ahead more quickly.
On the other, Chinese startups, still in early days, lack a portfolio of their own IPs. Consequently, “they tend to compete on price with similar products in the same application fields,” observed Jian-Yue Pan, corporate vice president, Asia Pacific region of Synopsys.
Meanwhile, some China fabless are coming up with fresh ideas (i.e.
Apexone), operating with an incredible work ethic and directing a fanatical focus on customer service (i.e.
Awinic). Companies like
RDA,
Spreadtrum and Rockchip are growing like gangbusters.
It’s important to note that there is nothing monolithic about China or China’s fabless companies. Over the last two decades, a number of Chinese chip companies – some well known in the West – had distinct trajectories, with a full array of ups and downs. Some disappeared and others thrived, their fates depending on when each company was born, how it was managed, and whether the ecosystem in China was sufficient to spur growth.
Synopsys’ Pan turns out to be as good a student and observer of the Chinese semiconductor industry as any, since he has lived through the rise of the industry over the last 17 years while working at Synopsys in China.
Pan isn’t a returnee – like many other China fabless executives today who were born in China and came to the United States for graduate degrees, before going home again to help nurture the Chinese industry.
Pan is home-grown. He has worked his entire professional life in China, rather than in Silicon Valley, after graduation from the nation’s elite Tsinghua University in early the 1990’s.
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