China has become the world’s No.1 country in publishing semiconductor-related papers, more than the following three ranked countries combined, according to a report published by the Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO) at Georgetown University.
The ETO report said that from 2018 to 2023, Chinese scholars published 160,852 academic articles, more than the US (71,688), India (39,709), Japan (30,401), and South Korea (28,345). Regarding the number of citations per article, the US achieved 17.6, compared with China’s 14.8.
All the top 10 research organisations were based in China, except France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which ranked No.3.
From 2018 to 2023, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) published 14,387 chip-related articles, followed by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (7,849), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (5,446), and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (5,237).
However, China only ranked fifth globally regarding the number of papers published by chip makers.
Samsung published 1,940 articles from 2018 to 2023, followed by STMicroelectronics (1,070), Intel (951), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC, 611) and China Electronic Technology Group Corp (CETC, 594).
In terms of the number of citations per article, Intel achieved 17.3, followed by Samsung (16.8), IBM (15.4), and Samsung (16.8). CETC ranked only 10th.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP), owned by Alibaba’s co-founder Jack Ma, reported on the ETO report with the headline “Tech war: China leads US in quantity, quality of semiconductor research, report finds.” It referred to “quantity” as Chinese researchers’ high number of citations per article.
Zachary Arnold, a lead analyst at the ETO, told Nature magazine that although the study’s findings do not mean that China is currently leading the chip-making field, “it’s showing us where things are headed.”
The ETO report added that if China develops its research work into commercial applications, the US might soon find it impossible to use export controls to retain its competitive advantage in high-performance microchip design and production.
Chen Yunji, a co-founder of AI-chip design firm Cambricon, told Nature that China’s ability to make high-end chips lags behind its chip design, partly due to US export controls.
Meanwhile, the quality of some academic papers in China is in doubt due to the activities of “paper mills,” which refer to businesses that produce fraudulent or low-quality manuscripts and sell authorship.
On December 31 last year, China’s Supreme People’s Court issued guidance calling for a crackdown on “paper mills.” It also called for lower courts to crack down on “paper industry chains” and severely punish those who committed research fraud.
US export controls
In 2019, the Trump administration asked ASML, the world’s largest chip equipment supplier in the Netherlands, to stop shipping extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines to China. EUV lithography can make 7nm chips in a single exposure and 2-3nm chips in multiple exposures.
Since then, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) has tried making 7nm chips using deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines and multiple exposure techniques. It successfully made Kirin 9000s chips for Huawei Technologies’ Mate60 smartphones, which were launched in September 2023.
At the beginning of 2024, the Dutch government stopped granting licenses for ASML to export its NXT:2000i and subsequent DUV immersion systems to China.
“China’s scientific and technological innovation has more than once defied people’s imagination,” Minister Wang Yi, member of the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and Foreign Minister, said in a press conference in Beijing on March 7.
“This journey has not been smooth. Be it missile technology, space science or chip making, unjustified external suppression has never stopped. But where there is a blockade, there is a breakthrough; where there is suppression, there is innovation.”
Citing an ancient Chinese verse, “No mountains can stop the surging flow of a mighty river,” Wang said blockade cannot stop China’s technological advancement.
He said science and technology should not be used to create an iron curtain but be shared by all; China is ready to share its technology with the Global South.
He stressed that “high fences and small yards,” a policy that forbids China from obtaining US high technology during the Biden era, could not suppress China’s spirit of innovation. He said decoupling and disruption of supply chains will only lead to self-isolation.
US President Donald Trump, who began his second term on January 20 this year, also thinks Biden’s “high fences and small yards” policy does not work.
White House officials have recently met with Japanese and Dutch officials to discuss stopping Tokyo Electron and ASML from maintaining semiconductor gear at Chinese chip fabs.
They said Japan and the Netherlands should ask their firms to match the limits the US has placed on its own companies, including Lam Research Corp, KLA Corp and Applied Materials Inc.
Surpassing South Korea?
China has been trying to make its lithography for a decade by pouring tens of billions of dollars into the semiconductor industry. However, the program failed to achieve the expected results due to corruption. In July 2022, a dozen top Chinese officials and executives of a national investment fund and related companies were arrested.
China now focuses on chip design and packaging technologies, which do not rely on EUV lithography.
The Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP), a think tank in South Korea, said in a recent survey that China has overtaken Korea in nearly every major area of semiconductor technology.
The survey, which interviewed 39 industry experts, said China now leads in high-intensity and resistance-based memory technology, scoring 94.1% compared to Korea’s 90.9%. The highest benchmark is 100%.
Resistance-based memory, or resistive random access memory (ReRAM or RRAM), is a future technology suitable for deep learning computations. It will eventually replace traditional flash memory.
KISTEP also found that Korea lags behind China in high-performance, low-power artificial intelligence (AI) chips, scoring 84.1% compared to China’s 88.3%.
It said the rise of China’s chip technology is a wake-up call for Korea, which must accelerate its technological innovation with government and private-sector support.
Last year, Huawei struggled to make enough Kirin 9100 chips for its new flagship smartphone, Mate70, due to SMIC’s limited production capability of 7nm chips.
A Henan-based IT columnist said China could use its 14nm chip processing and 3D packaging technology to make chips with performance equivalent to 3nm and 5nm chips. This would involve stacking up some mid-end chips to increase computing speed.
Yong Jian is a contributor to the Asia Times. He is a Chinese journalist who specializes in Chinese technology, economy and politics.
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