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TAP TIMES -25- FEBRUARY 2022
China’s chip sales (from 24)
Equally startling is the number of new
firms in China rushing into the semicon-
ductor industry.
Fabless startups
Nearly 15,000 Chinese firms registered as
semiconductor enterprises in 2020. A large
number of these new firms are fabless
start-ups specializing in GPU, EDA, FPGA,
AI computing, and other higher-end chip
design.
Many of these firms are developing ad-
vanced chips, designing and taping out
devices on bleeding-edge process nodes.
Sales of Chinese high-end logic devices
are also accelerating, with the combined
revenue of China’s CPU, GPU, and FPGA
sectors growing at an annual rate of 128%
to nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2020, up
from a meager $60 million in 2015.
Robust growth
China also maintains robust growth in
building out its semiconductor manufac-
turing supply chain, with 28 additional fab
construction projects totaling $26 billion in
new planned funding announced in 2021.
SMIC and other Chinese semiconductor
leaders have further expanded their part-
nerships with local governments to con-
struct additional joint venture fabs, with a
focus on mature technology nodes.
Wafer manufacturing startups are continu-
ing to spring up in the trailing-edge fabri-
cation field, backed by government incen-
tives.
Mature fabrication technology
On the chip manufacturing front, due to
the inclusion of Huawei and SMIC on the
U.S. government’s Entity List (China’s
most advanced chip designer and foundry,
respectively), the Chinese semiconductor
industry has largely suspended advanced
logic node manufacturing development
and redirected most capital to mature
fabrication technology.
As a result of this change, from Septem-
ber 2020 to November 2021, Chinese
wafer manufacturers have added nearly
500K wafer per month (WPM) capacities
in trailing nodes (>=14nm), and only an
additional 10K in capacity for advanced
nodes. China’s wafer capacity increase
alone accounted for 26% of the worldwide
total .
In 2021, China
also started
commercial
shipments of
indigenously
manufactured
mobile 19nm
DDR4 DRAM
devices, and
64-layer 3D
NAND Flash
chips and started 128-layer products.
Becoming highly competitive
While the Chinese memory industry is still
at an early stage of development, Chinese
memory firms are expected to achieve a
compound annual growth rate of 40-50%
in output and become highly competitive
over the next five years.
Regarding backend production, China is a
global leader in outsourced assembly,
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