GSA announces state of China IC design industry 2012 report

TAIWAN: The Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) announced the State of China IC Design Industry 2012 Report. This report is primarily based on the presentation “Sustainability Challenging Fabless beyond 20nm” given by Dr. Shao Jun Wei, chairman, IC Design Branch, China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA) at the 2012 GSA Semiconductor Leaders Forum Taiwan on November 7th.

Additional data and viewpoints were taken from Dr. Wei’s presentation, “Strengthen Basic Capacity-Building, and Maintain the Road of Sustainable Development” given at 2012 CSIA-ICCAD conference on December 6th, in Chongqing.

Based on Dr. Wei’s data, China’s IC design industry accounts for 13.61 percent of total fabless sales in 2012. Even though the overall scale of China IC industry is still relatively small, it has gained much attention from global players due to its large domestic market potentials and vast engineering talents long term.

Total sales for China’s fabless industry reached RMB 68 billion in 2012 (over $10.8 billion), increasing 8.98 percent from RMB 62.4 billion in 2011. Although there are many challenges facing global semiconductor markets today, China will definitely play a bigger role and help drive its continuous growth in coming years.

As the semiconductor industry heads towards the post-Moore’s Law era, uncertainty increases and the technology roadmap is no longer as well defined as before. China's fabless companies need to get ready for this paradigm shift and some suggestions stated in this report including; enhancing the physical design availability, building a strong design team, and establishing new strategic partnerships with foundries as huge amount of investment in advanced technologies and manufacturing capacity will further tighten the collaboration between fabless companies and foundries. Innovation from middle to small design houses will remain as one of main drivers to achieving future market success in this new era.