It’s no secret that China has been attempting to increase domestic semiconductor production over the last few years and continues to make moves in the semiconductor race. However, despite the many theories floating around the semiconductor industry about how China plans to achieve its goals, the facts are that China continues to invest heavily in its semiconductor industry through the green lighting of many projects. The common denominator in those projects is that the majority have R&D or infrastructure components in the plans.
China’s “Made in China” initiatives designed to reduce dependence on western technologies are said to be because of the progressive deterioration in US-China relations and the fear that the US will deny China access to advanced microprocessors and the equipment needed to make them. Production at advanced levels requires vast investments and access to complex global supply chains producing chemicals at high purity levels and lenses, valves, and tubes engineered to the highest levels of precision. According to Semiconductor Industry Association, China is investing well over $150 billion from 2014 through 2030 in semiconductors. Below are details of some of the latest semiconductor projects launched in China this September.
The 2022 Yuelu Internet Summit launched twenty-four significant projects with 83.31 billion yuan invested. Of those twenty-four projects, almost all had heavy R&D components, demonstrating that the race for semiconductor dominance is still ongoing. Four of the more prominent projects that came from the Summit were:
- Jinbo Changsha Semiconductor Industrial Park and carbon-based materials industrialization R&D center project. Its focus is to carry out scientific and technological research for cutting-edge technologies in semiconductors, hydrogen energy, and carbon ceramic braking systems.
- Anmuquan’s high-end chip packaging project will build an advanced packaging and production expansion base for high-end chips, including the expansion of flip chip packaging (FC) production lines, system level packaging (SLP) production lines for CPU, GPU, DSP, artificial intelligence, and the construction of new chip test lines.
- Jinxin Electronics headquarters base project. It will build an R&D center and laboratory focusing on the R&D and design of medium and high-end digital signal processing chips (DSP) and the design and development of embedded solutions.
East China also green-lighted several projects in September. Still, the most notable was Techphant’s R&D project, whose goal is a new type of infrastructure for the government’s digital efforts to promote IoT-aware city solutions.
These few highlighted projects demonstrate the continued investment China is making into its semiconductor industry in the hopes that it will achieve technological independence.
