China has become the world’s largest semiconductor market, consuming a large number of semiconductor chips every year. Driven by market applications and supported by the National Semiconductor Fund, my country’s semiconductor industry has achieved rapid development, and a number of representative semiconductor IC design companies have gradually emerged. Let’s take a look at the top ten integrated circuit design companies in China.
- Huawei HiSilicon
HiSilicon has grown into the number one integrated circuit design company in China and the top five in the world. It is the first company to commercialize 5G wireless chips and promote the development of the 5G industry.
HiSilicon has five series of chips, namely Kirin CPU for smartphones, Kunpeng series server CPU for data centers, Ascend AI chip for artificial intelligence scenarios, and 4G and 5G connection integrated chips (base station chip Tiangang, terminal chip Baron) and other dedicated video Monitoring, set-top boxes, smart TVs, Internet of Things and other chips.
HiSilicon’s independently developed high-performance Kirin CPU based on ARM architecture has established Huawei’s position as the king of the global high-end mobile phone integrated chip market. The independently developed Kunpeng series server CPUs are fully used in Huawei Kunpeng servers. Tiangang 5G base station chips and Balong 5G terminal chips fully support Huawei’s 5G business.
Fumax is an electronics company that designs, manufactures, and tests printed circuit boards (PCBs) in China. It can carry out customized design and production according to user needs.
Fumax is a high-tech enterprise specializing in microelectronic chip design, packaging, testing and sales. One-stop OEM/ODM solution provider, including component procurement, PCB manufacturing, PCB assembly, plastic/metal box manufacturing, sub-assembly to complete assembled products. Provide users with new product design, electronic schematic design, PCB layout, mechanical design, prototype and trial operation to mass production.
- Loongson Technology
As a leading company in domestic CPU chip design, under the leadership of Dr. Hu Weiwu, chief CPU scientist of Loongson Technology, Loongson Technology has developed three series of high-performance CPU chips: Loongson 1, Loongson 2, and Loongson 3.
The Loongson series general-purpose CPU is completely independently developed and uses a RISC instruction set similar to the MIPS instruction set. There is still a big gap between the main frequency, computing power and power consumption compared with Intel and AMD.
4.T-HEAD
T-HEAD was formed by the merger of the chip development teams of Hangzhou Zhongtian Microelectronics and Alibaba Damo Academy. Hangzhou Zhongtian Microsystem Co., Ltd. is the only company in mainland China that has its own embedded CPU IP core and is engaged in high-performance CPU R&D and industrialized integrated circuit design.
Alibaba Damo Academy is a scientific research institution established by Alibaba in multiple locations around the world. It is based on basic science, disruptive and applied technology research. One of the main business areas of chip design and development.
On September 25, 2019, Alibaba Chief Technology Officer Zhang Jianfeng officially released the world’s highest-performance artificial intelligence inference chip Hanguang 800 at the Computing Conference in Hangzhou. Hanguang 800 created two world records: one is peak performance of 78,000 IPS, which is five times that of the second place. The other one has an energy efficiency ratio of 500 IPS/W, while the second one has only 150 IPS/W. Its display performance is 15 times that of the latest T4 from the old chip brand NVIDIA.
Hanguang 800 chip is also the first chip to be officially mass-produced after Alibaba established Pingtouge Semiconductor. It has been mass-produced and commercialized, and has been fully used in Alibaba’s back-end big data and cloud computing servers, greatly improving the server’s processing performance.
In fact, in addition to Hanguang 800, Pingtouge Semiconductor, established by Alibaba last year, also released the processor chip Xiantie 910 and the Wujian SoC platform. The underlying architecture is completely independently developed, and its computing power performance has repeatedly broken world records.
5.YANGTZE MEMORY
Yangtze Memory Technology Co., Ltd. (YMTC) is China’s leading memory chip designer and manufacturer under Tsinghua Unigroup. It is an integrated IDM integrated circuit company focusing on the design and manufacturing of 3D NAND flash memory, and also provides complete memory solutions. Yangtze Memory provides global partners with 3D NAND flash memory wafers and particles, embedded memory chips, consumer-grade, enterprise-grade solid-state drives and other products and solutions, which are widely used in mobile communications, consumer digital, computers, servers and data centers.
In 2019, Yangtze Memory launched China’s first 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory product based on the Xtacking architecture and achieved mass production of 64-layer flash memory. Subsequently, Yangtze Memory announced in early 2020 that they had successfully developed 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory, skipping the 96 layers common in the industry.
6.GigaDevice
GigaDevice is a leading provider of memory technology and IC solutions. Currently, GigaDevice is mainly engaged in three major businesses: memory chips, MCUs and sensors. Among them, the memory chip business is the company’s core business, with NOR flash memory as its core product.
NOR flash has the largest market share in China and is one of the three largest suppliers of NOR flash memory in the world.
It is currently gradually expanding into NAND flash memory and actively deploying DRAM business. GigaDevice announced its cooperation with Rambus. Following Hefei Changxin, GigaDevice and Rambus reached a DRAM memory patent agreement and will achieve mass production of DRAM memory chips as soon as 2021.
6.GOODIX
GOODIX is a global leader in human-computer interaction and biometric identification technologies. Mainly used in fingerprint recognition technology such as mobile phones, tablets, and wearable products.
Goodix Technology is an overall application solution provider based on IC design and software development. Currently, it mainly provides leading semiconductor software and hardware solutions for intelligent terminals, Internet of Things, and automotive electronics.
Goodix Technology is a global leader in human-computer interaction and biometric technologies. Its products and solutions have been widely used in well-known brands such as Huawei, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung, Google, Amazon, Dell, HP, LG, OnePlus, Nokia, Asus, etc., serving hundreds of millions of people around the world, and are used in the Android camp. Broadest provider of biometric solutions.
8.HUADA SEMICONDUCTOR
Huada Semiconductor is a professional sub-group established by China Electronics Information Industry Corporation to integrate its integrated circuit enterprises. It specializes in integrated circuit design and related solutions. It has a large presence in smart cards and security chips, smart card applications, analog circuits and new displays.
Huada Semiconductor’s main product categories include industrial control MCUs, power supply and driver chips, smart cards and security chips, power management chips and new display chips.
Huada Semiconductor vigorously promotes the research and development and application of industrial control (including automotive electronics), secure Internet of Things, new display and other products to continuously enhance its competitiveness.
9. Cambricon
Cambricon is a pioneer in the global smart IC field. We are committed to building core processor chips for various types of smart cloud servers, smart edge devices, and smart terminals, allowing machines to better understand and serve humans, and build a new smart ecosystem with many partners around the world. Breakthroughs and innovations in smart chip technology drive the artificial intelligence computing engine.
- UNISOC
UNISOC is an integrated circuit design company under Unisoc Group. It is China’s second largest integrated circuit chip design company after Huawei HiSilicon. It has become the first echelon of 5G chips in the world.
UNISOC was formed from the merger of Spreadtrum and RDA. After the merger, Spreadtrum will continue to focus on the independent research and development and design of 2G/3G/4G/5G mobile communication baseband chips, and will devote its research and development to the field of Internet of Things, that is, the research and development of core technologies. UNISOC has R&D centers in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xiamen, San Diego and other cities to support the research and development of communication chips and IoT chips.
UNISOC released the first 5G communication platform Makalu and the 5G baseband chip Ivy V510 based on the Makalu platform in June 2019. This is the first time that Unisoc has publicly demonstrated 5G chip products and technology platforms.
Then in August 2019, UNISOC released the Huben T710 high-performance AI application processor. With its excellent architecture and computing power, Huben T710 ranks among the best in foreign benchmarking competitions. Based on the combination of Huben T710 and Ivy V510, UNISOC launched its first 5G solution – Huben T7510.
On February 26, 2020, UNISOC once again released the next-generation 5G SoC mobile platform Huben T7520. This product uses 6nm extreme ultraviolet advanced technology, which greatly increases the density of extreme ultraviolet transistors and effectively reduces the power consumption of the chip.