Top 10 IC Design Companies in China

1. Huawei HiSilicon

HiSilicon has grown into the number one IC design company in China and the top 5 in the world and is the first company to commercialize 5G wireless chipsets to 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, Ascension series SOCs for artificial intelligence scene AI chipsets, and 4G and 5G connections Chips (base station chip Tiangang, terminal chip Balong) and other dedicated video surveillance, set-top boxes, smart TV, Internet of Things and other chips.

HiSilicon's self-developed high-performance Kirin CPU based on ARM architecture has established Huawei's mobile phone as the king of the global high-end mobile phone market. The independently developed Kunpeng series server CPU is fully used in Huawei Kunpeng servers. Tiangang 5G base station chips and Balong 5G terminal chips have fully supported Huawei's 5G business.

2. UNISOC

UNISOC is an IC design company under the Ziguang Group. It is the second-largest IC chip design company in China after Huawei HiSilicon. It has become the first echelon of 5G chips in the world.

UNISOC is formed by 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 RDA will be dedicated to the field of Internet of Things, that is, 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 its first 5G communication platform Makalu and its 5G baseband chip Ivy V510 based on the Makalu platform in June 2019. This is UNISOC's first public demonstration of 5G chip products and technology platforms.

Then in August 2019, UNISOC released the Tiger Ben T710 high-performance AI application processor. With its excellent architecture and computing power, the Tiger Ben T710 topped the list in foreign benchmarking competitions. Based on the combination of the Huben T710 and the Ivy V510, UNISOC launched the first 5G solution, the Huben T7510.

On February 26, 2020, UNISOC released the next-generation 5G SoC mobile platform Tiger Ben T7520 again. This product adopts 6nm EUV advanced technology, which greatly improves the EUV transistor density and effectively reduces the power consumption of the chip.

3. Loongson Technology

As a leading enterprise in domestic CPU chip design, Loongson Technology has successively developed three series of high-performance CPU chips, namely Loongson 1, Loongson 2, and Loongson 3, under the leadership of Dr. Hu Weiwu, the chief scientist of Loongson CPU.

The Loongson series of general-purpose CPUs are completely self-developed and use the RISC instruction set, which is similar to the MIPS instruction set. The main frequency, computing power, and power consumption are far behind Intel and AMD.

4. Ali T-Head Semiconductor

Ali's T-Head Semiconductor Company was formed by the merger of Hangzhou Zhongtian Microelectronics and the chip development team of Ali Dharma Academy. Hangzhou Zhongtian Microsystem Co., Ltd. is the only company in mainland China with its own embedded CPU IP Core, engaged in integrated circuit design for high-performance CPU R&D and industrialization.

Alibaba DAMO Academy is a scientific research institution established by Alibaba in multiple locations around the world. It is based on the research of basic science, disruptive technology, and applied technology. Chip design and development is one of the major business areas.

On September 25, 2019, Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Dharma Academy, officially released the world's highest-performance AI inference chip Hanguang 800 at the Hangzhou Yunqi Conference. Hanguang 800 has set 2 world records: one is the peak performance of 78,000 IPS, 5 times more than the second place; the other is the energy efficiency ratio of 500 IPS/W, while the second place is only 150 IPS/W; and its display performance is 15 times that of the latest T4 of the old chip brand NVIDIA.

The Hanguang 800 chip is also the first chip that was officially taped out after Alibaba established T-Head Semiconductor. It has been mass-produced for commercial use and has been fully used in Alibaba's back-end big data and cloud computing servers, greatly improving the processing performance of the server.

In fact, in addition to the Hanguang 800, T-Head Semiconductor, a company established by Alibaba last year, has also released the processor chip Xuantie 910 and the Wujian SoC platform. The underlying architecture is completely self-developed and the computing power performance has broken world records many times.

5. Yangtze Memory Technology Corp

Yangtze Memory Technology Corp (YMTC) is China's leading memory chip designer and manufacturer under Tsinghua Unigroup. It is an IDM integrated circuit enterprise focusing on the integration of 3D NAND flash memory design and manufacturing, and also provides complete memory solutions. YMTC supplies 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, YMTC launched China's first 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory product based on the Xtacking architecture, and achieved mass production of the 64-layer flash memory. Then, YMTC announced in early 2020 that they skipped the common 96 layers in the industry and successfully developed a 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory.

6. GigaDevice

GigaDevice is a leading provider of memory technology and IC solutions. At present, GigaDevice is mainly engaged in three businesses: memory chips, MCUs, and sensors. Among them, the memory chip business is the company's core business, mainly with NOR flash as the core product. NOR flash has the largest market share in China and is also one of the top three suppliers of NOR flash in the world.

At present, it is gradually expanding to NAND flash, and actively deploying DRAM business. GigaDevice announced to cooperate with Rambus. Following Hefei Changxin, GigaDevice and Rambus have reached a DRAM memory patent agreement and will realize mass production of DRAM memory chips as soon as 2021.

7. Goodix Technology

Goodix Technology is the world's leader in human-computer interaction and biometric identification technology. It is mainly used in mobile phones, tablet computers, wearable products, and other fingerprint recognition technologies.

Goodix Technology is a provider of overall application solutions based on IC design and software development. Currently, it mainly provides leading semiconductor software and hardware solutions for smart terminals, the Internet of Things, and automotive electronics.

Goodix Technology is the world leader in human-computer interaction and biometrics technology. Its products and solutions have been widely used in Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung, Google, Amazon, Dell, HP, LG, OnePlus, Nokia, ASUS, and other well-known brands, serving hundreds of millions of people around the world, and is the most widely used biometric solution provider in the Android camp.

8. Huada Semiconductor

Huada Semiconductor is a professional sub-group established by China Electronics Information Industry Group Co., Ltd. to integrate its integrated circuit enterprises, specializing in integrated circuit design and related solutions. It occupies a large share in the fields of smart cards and security chips, smart card applications, analog circuits, and new displays.

The main product categories of Huada Semiconductor include industrial control MCU, power 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 products such as industrial control (including automotive electronics), secure Internet of Things, and new displays, and continuously improve its competitiveness.

9. Cambrian

Cambrian is a pioneer in the field of global smart ICs. Cambrian focuses on a new intelligent ecosystem integrating cloud, edge, and terminal, and is committed to building core processor chips for various types of smart cloud servers, smart edge devices, and smart terminals so that machines can better understand and serve humanity.

At present, Cambricon has established good cooperative relations with many upstream and downstream enterprises in the smart industry. In the future, Cambricon will continue to adhere to an open and win-win attitude, and build a new intelligent ecosystem with many partners around the world. Breakthroughs and innovations in smart chip technology drive the artificial intelligence computing power engine.

10. Bitmain

Bitmain is a brand under Beijing Bitmain Technology Co., Ltd. It was established in 2013 and is mainly engaged in the design and development of high-speed and low-power custom chips. It is mainly used in finance, high-performance computing HPC, machine learning algorithms, AI artificial intelligence, and other fields. Now sales and services are all over the world in more than 100 countries.

Bitmain is a world-leading technology company. Its products include computing power chips, computing power servers, and computing power clouds, which are mainly used in finance, high-performance computing HPC, machine learning algorithms, AI artificial intelligence, and other fields.

Bitmain is headquartered in Haidian District, Beijing, and has R&D centers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States. In line with the corporate vision of focusing on the main business, developing orderly and horizontally, and becoming a world-leading technology company, Bitmain actively expands the global layout of the computing power center, continuously improves the resource utilization of blockchain cloud computing, and explores and discovers environmentally friendly Blockchain cloud computing technology.