Semiconductor Development for Today and Tomorrow's China

 

Objective: establish semiconductor infrastructure to incubate local IC design, and to further thrive semiconductor industry in China.

 

Semiconductor Infrastructure:

 

v     Supply Chain: foundry, testing house, packaging house, etc.

v     Design Chain: IP, design standards, common design environment, design collaboration, design service, etc.

 

Mentality:

 

v     Leverage: Always leverage what we have and what we do not have such as OPR (Other People’s Resource, including expertise and facility) and resource virtualization for zero-head-count administration

v     Integration: Will efficiently rely on knowledge database and sufficient economy scale.

v     Localization and Globalization

 

Business Model: should be re-justified during various phases. It will instruct the staged outcome to survive and thrive during phase-by-phase development, and to sustain the ultimate goal.

 

Strategy: embrace China market first, and then expand to the global.

 

Phase: could be pipelined.

 

1. Pure Foundry

TSMC is the typical case. It will be foundry-centric to incubate IC design. However, the clear cut will be drawn between foundry and fabless design house. The business model is to stabilize the process technology along with full utilization, and to target mainstreamed chip designs.

2. Semi-IDM: Foundry + IC Design + Design Service è incubation

UMC is the model that can be referenced. Moreover, it can be extended to incubate more fabless design houses in China.

Here are possible leverages step by step, and to gradually become competitive advantages.

 

v     Leverage local strengths to accommodate the designs from Huawei, Haier, and etc.

v     Apply ASIC-vendor design service model to provide GUI-based design flows.

v     Utilize own and 3^rd-party design services to develop more IPs and penetrate various areas to enrich more domain knowledge.

v     Enhance to do system-centric and platform-centric for Inspur on storage and Huawei on connectivity.

v     Spawn more fabless design houses based upon aforementioned endeavors.

3. Design Foundry   à Virtual Design Collaboration (design infrastructure + common design methodology) à standard

v     SOC (System-On-Chip): typical top-down design to integrate the system on a chip.

v     STC (System-To-Chip): another system view to narrow down for chip design in terms of DFM and packaging.

v     Design standard: It will be the better way to come up with US. After all, semiconductor started from the IDM model in US, All major companies such as Intel and TI have their so-called design blue-books. China should unify all strengths to make the difference.

4. Supply Chain à Foundry + testing + packaging + logistics optimization

Supply chain infrastructure for eco-systems on PC, mobile phone, consumer electronics, health care, and etc.

 

5. IC/IP-centric Knowledge Transformer: Will benefit from design foundry and supply chain. The traditional product prototype should be broken into an innovative way. It should be transformed from an idea to product in the form of tangible or intangible.

 

Competitive Advantage: overhaul what you have at hand

1. policy
2. people
3. market
4. economic scale, finance
5. brand
6. technology
7. networking including partner, alliance, ……
8. supply chain or logistics
9. eco-system
10. other

 

Are You Ready?