| Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach parity so these students can enter a mature semiconductor industry. Give these students ~5-15 years to gain expertise from the American academic system and industrial research base and I think we'll start seeing China innovate. American expertise will naturally decline because we don't have students studying EE. To many good full-stack jobs that pay ~40% more. |
China dominates in the 'jelly bean[1]' chip business. This was the bread an butter for the dozen semiconductor shops in the Bay Area during the 70's through the early naughts. As fabs shut down they became 'fabless' and had their work shipped out to TSMC. Now they exist as a genre in China in much greater numbers than they do here. Companies that will make a couple of wafers of USB + ADC + random logic kinds of things.
And the innovation never comes from the chip companies, it comes from companies that are building the products. They go to the chip companies and say "Can you make a chip that does this?" and then a new jelly bean chip is born and if that product gets traction everyone decides to make one with their own bit of spin.
What is unique to the Chinese scene is that there are thousands of minute variations rather than any sort of ordered discipline. Transistors are free at the jelly bean chip level so there is no incentive to re-use or save on chips.
ARM has become the defacto microprocessor architecture because, in part, ARM will license it to anyone.
In the US all of these folks have coalesced into a few mega companies (TI, NXP, Microchip, Maxim) which don't have much in the way of competition locally. So innovation stops because conservative business practices rule.
This really became clear to me when I started perusing datasheet sites for the Chinese market and realizing there are hundreds if not thousands of chips for which there is no English data sheet. This is a complete reverse from the last century when nearly every data sheet was in English and getting a Chinese version was a challenge.
[1] Jelly Bean chips are those that are made in batches of 1 - 10 million with a set of functions that are fairly specific to their application.