Last Thursday (April 6, 2023), China's "National Integrated Circuit Standardization Technical Committee" (hereinafter referred to as the IC Standardization Committee) was established in Beijing.
A total of more than 70 members, including experts and consultants, participated in the founding meeting and the first committee meeting. The establishment of this committee shows that the standardization of ICs is of great significance to the implementation of the national standardization development strategy.
The list of members of the IC Standardization Committee has not been disclosed to the public, but according to the IC Standardization Committee's 2021 preparation list collected by China's media IT House, the list includes 90 participants, among them are Hisilicon Semiconductor, Datang Semiconductor, Ziguang Tongxin Microelectronics, Zhanrui Communication, SMIC, Datang Mobile, China Mobile, China Unicom, Huawei, ZTE, China Information and Communication Technology, Tencent, Xiaomi, etc.
Regarding the establishment of the IC standard committee, the Global Times reported the following day, quoting an industry expert: "The biggest problem of China's chip industry is that the whole development is led by foreign standards... it is important to develop a unified domestic standard."
DIGITIMES Research Editor Amanda Liang believes that in order to circumvent the US blockade, China is trying to find countermeasures that rely on China's huge market size, and it has taken steps to set its own standards and mastering the rules of the game.
Though the country seems to have been completely suppressed by various U.S. sanctions on the semiconductor battlefield, unable to come up with clear countermeasures, China is not sitting still on the strategic level. One of the main earlier strategies is to invest via the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase I and Phase II (also known as the Big Fund I and II), but the result turned out to be bad and even caused some officials to be detained for corruption.
Against this background, we can regard the establishment of the IC Standards Committee as another Chinese response against US semiconductor sanctions, and it is a fundamental response based on the huge domestic demand for semiconductors in mainland China in order to implement the "import substitution" strategy, the first task of which is to unify domestic standards so as to improve the efficiency of market supply and demand.
The key to the success of this strategy lies in the speed and extent of the import substitution. For example, if China has already been able to produce logic chips with 14-nanometer process technology, the US export restriction on logic chips based on FinFET 16/14nm technology would be withdrawn.
In other words, China is using its largest chip consumption market in the world as a strategic weapon against US semiconductor sanctions. This may be the most powerful condition China can rely on.
