China's cold war with the US on chips isn't slowing down the country's rapid growth in semiconductors, the Semiconductor Industry Association said this week.
The US sanctions on Chinese companies didn't have the intended effect of restricting China's semiconductor industry. In fact, the saber-rattling is only serving for China to get its act together on semiconductors, the industry body warned.
China's semiconductor industry sales totaled $39.8bn in 2020, a growth rate of 30.6 per cent from 2019, the SIA
said. In 2015, China chip sales were just $13bn, or a 3.8 per cent market share.
Sales numbers for 2021 were not available. But the SIA is projecting that China, if it maintains that growth rate, could surpass EU and Japan as early as next year, and close the gap with US and Korea, whose predicted sales are on a largely declining or flat curve through 2025.
The SIA pointed out China's preference for procuring homegrown technology as a reason for the boom in the chip sector. The trade wars with the US, which discouraged chip companies from doing business in China, also revitalized the domestic chip sector with funding and incentives.
China quickly recognized semiconductors as being the foundation for its electronics industry plans, and prioritized their development much earlier than EU and US, which focused on home-grown semiconductor facilities only after being hit by shortages.
Some Chinese organizations on the US Entity list, including Chinese Academy of Sciences, are
developing homegrown CPUs based on RISC-V. China Mobile this month
deployed a chip made by Chinese company Phythium - which is also on the US Entity List - in the cloud.
The combined revenue of China’s CPU, GPU, and FPGA sectors was about $1bn in 2020, up from $60m in 2015, the SIA wrote. About 15,000 companies in China are registered as semiconductor companies, most of them fabless.
