Tech war: China leads US in quantity, quality of semiconductor research, report finds
China is producing twice as many research papers as the US on chip design and fabrication, laying the foundation for a possible leadership role in next-generation semiconductor technology, according to a US think tank.
While China is behind in advanced semiconductors and is restricted from buying high-end chipmaking tools such as the extreme ultraviolet lithography system developed by Dutch firm ASML, Chinese scholars published a total of 160,852 chip-related papers from 2018 to 2023, more than the next three ranked countries combined, according to the Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO) at Georgetown University.
The US was in second place with 71,688 articles, less than half of China’s output, followed by India and Japan, according to the report released on Monday. The ETO found that Chinese institutions accounted for nine spots in the top-10 producers of chip articles between 2018 and 2023, and eight spots in the category of highly cited publications. The Chinese Academy of Sciences was the country’s leading publisher of all chip design and fabrication research, as well as the most cited in the research category.
In research papers that were cited the most by peers, 23,520 publications in the chip design and fabrication field featured authors affiliated with Chinese institutions, compared to 22 per cent with US authors and 17 per cent with European authors.
Around 475,000 chip design and fabrication-related articles were published globally between 2018 and 2023, according to the ETO report, which reviews public research papers with English-language abstracts.
China’s lead in chip research comes amid the country’s push for self-reliance in the semiconductor industry to counter sanctions imposed by Washington over national security concerns. China’s lead in the volume of research papers has come in tandem with the country’s rapid progress in semiconductor self-sufficiency.
A research note by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, noted on Monday that China “is building massive data centres, expanding its power sector, and developing domestic AI chips to reduce Western dependence” on top of the success of DeepSeek.