China to topple Silicon Valley, threaten Intel, AMD
Country in semiconductor equivalent of "long march"
By Mike Magee: Friday 07 March 2003, 08:01
THE DEVELOPMENT OF semiconductor technology in Red China is a "long march" that is set to topple Silicon Valley as the world's centre of chip technology, a market research firm has said.
In a report called China's Fabless Firms race beyond Foundation Stage, iSuppli said that there's been a migration of integrated circuit (IC) engineers from California and from Taiwan, and that's letting China rapidly ramp up its advanced process technology.
Government sponsored projects including the "golden card", HDTV and multi project wafer projects will lead to several fabless firms – companies that don't need semiconductor factories – achieving revenue of $120 million annually.
And, the report said, the Chinese government will pour $2.5 billion into a dozen R&D products, and is looking particularly closely at investing in CPUs.
Those CPUs include the 32-bit ARK-1, built on a .25 micron process, an eight bit CISC and 16-bit RISC core from Beijing Beida Jade Bird Group, and the more well known Godson [Godzilla? Ed.] which can deliver fixed and FP speeds of up to 200MIPS. A Shenzhen fabless designer is reportedly sampling a 64-bit CPU.
Further, the semi firms have made breakthroughs in communication ASICs, smart card chips, 32-bit and even 64-bit CPUs. Yesterday a Chinese firm announced it had designed its own digital signal processor (DSP).
The report said that Chinese fabless firms will shortly introduce their own design technology using commercial intellectual property, will prove to system vendors that the designs can match foreign rivals, and lower costs by using global and local fabrication plants.
There are big differences between the Chinese and other models, said iSuppli. China's IC industry is a hybrid model that includes OEM owned design centres, design companies, third party design companies, fab owned design centres, IC vendor design centers, and EDA design centres.
While China used $20 billion worth of integrated circuits in 2001, only three per cent of those were home grown.
That is destined to change.
The report said that because of the huge potential market and support from the Chinese government, the fabless chip designers will make HDTV chipsets, Card ICs, handset chipsets, CPUs, and comms ASICS.
While North America dominates the fabless industry and had 60% market share worth $10 billion in 2002, Taiwan has 23.5% worth $4 billion, and Europe/Israel eight per cent share, worth $1.4 billion.
But iSuppli predicts that by 2008, the Greater China area will displace North America.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8182
