China-affiliated academics produced more than twice the number of chip design and fabrication research articles as the US did between 2018 and 2023, according to the Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO), a think tank at Georgetown University in the US. In terms of top-cited research, the Chinese had more than double the articles of US researchers.
The ETO’s report showed that Chinese scholars published 160,852 articles on these subjects during that period, while their US counterparts published just 71,688 (India was in third place with 39,709). In total, about 475,000 papers concerning semiconductor research with English-language abstracts were published world-wide across the six years. (The ETO noted that exclusion of articles without English-language abstracts could affect the numbers for Chinese authors.)
Beijing’s Chinese Academy of Sciences was the research institution producing the most chip design and fabrication articles, and nine of the top 10 slots were occupied by Chinese institutions.
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The report also described growth in chip design and fabrication research as “steady, not skyrocketing.” Its charts showed the number of articles published in the field grew by 7.8 percent between 2013 and 2023, while those published on artificial intelligence (AI) research went up by 114 percent. Cybersecurity research, meanwhile, saw a 46 percent rise.
China has been pushing for self-reliance in the semiconductor industry in recent years, a process that’s been accelerated by waves of export control measures imposed by the US over what it described as national security concerns – with Washington openly waging a tech war on Beijing.
However, the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, earlier this year caught the US off guard with its ability of its large language model to outperform US-based rivals like OpenAI and Meta at a fraction of their cost.
