Chinese Semiconductor Market Trend

I am back AGAIN

Thanks to GFW, I have not been updated my blog for years. 

Now I can access my blogspot account. Recently, the semiconductors market has changed a lot. After Huawei has been blacklisted, more and more chips are not allowed to sell to China anymore. Since the supply chain has been blocked for over two years, a lot of Chinese semiconductors companies stared their IPO and more products are released to the market as well as other areas, there chips include the following sectors:

  • Memory: NOR/NAND flash, SSD, DRAM, SRAM, MRAM, EEPROM
  • CPU: CPU for desktop, server, thin-server, gateway
  • SoC: SoC for mobile, camera, TV and consumer video/audio, router and etc
  • MCU: MIPS/ARM/RISC-V/8051 based MCU
  • FPGA: entry level FPGA and CPLD
  • NPU: standard alone APU or embedded NPU IP
  • Logic: standard logic
  • Discrete: power, IGBT and RF
  • IP: EDA, IP vendors

Market Trend

I had worked for Philips/NXP semiconductors for 15 years. I know if the margin of a chip is lower than 30%, most of the semiconductors will consider to spin off the product line. However in China, the chips are getting more and more cheaper with relatively worse performance. As time goes by, more and more market share is acquired by Chinese suppliers. For example, broadcom, TI and cypress used to have embedded SoC PL for WiFi chip, but after expressif released ESP8266/ESP32 with mature software framework, almost 90% share belongs to expressif due to one reason, price. Now ESP8266/ESP32 becomes a de facto interface to IoT device.

Cons and Pros

However, due to cost consideration, most of the chips have compromise, compare to the top suppliers. For example, they use XIP flash, instead of embedded flash. The approach changes a lot in debugging, programming, security and software architecture.

Writing Plan


In 2021, I saw more similar situation. So I prepare a new list, so people can have an overview for these new chips. Here is a short list.

  • High performance MPU
  • General purpose MCU
  • Multi-core MCU
  • BLE/BLE Mesh
  • BT TWS audio
  • IEEE802.15.4 SoC
  • WiFi SoC
  • AIoT SoC
  • CAT-NB CAT-1 Modem


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