Silicon Valley chip designers lured back to Shanghai
TAIWAN IS THIRD LEG OF `GOLDEN TRIANGLE' NURTURING SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY BOOM
By Kristi Heim
Mercury News
SHANGHAI - Wayne Dai stands on the balcony of a private golf club, looking over a vast green fairway to the downtown skyline beyond.
After 20 years designing semiconductors in Silicon Valley, Dai has replanted his roots in his native Shanghai.
China's semiconductor boom is luring many top design experts like Dai back home. He is among a group of tech entrepreneurs who frequent Shanghai's exclusive golf courses and restaurants, cutting deals and dreaming of building this city into Asia's premier technology hub. These entrepreneurs are supplying the knowledge to help elevate China's semiconductor industry from low-end manufacturing to the creative core of the chip business.
``In the past, chip-design companies here copied designs from the U.S. and Taiwan,'' Dai said. ``Now China is starting to have its own design talent, and it will be very competitive in the future.''
Dai maintains strong ties to Silicon Valley, jetting across the Pacific every few months to his Santa Clara office or his post as a professor of computer engineering at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
The 47-year-old engineer helped found a design firm in Silicon Valley that was later bought by San Jose-based Cadence Design Systems for $100 million. Dai used some of the proceeds to establish VeriSilicon, his new Shanghai company, which supplies design services for China's biggest chip-makers.
In front of VeriSilicon's office building, eight towering metal sculptures are arranged in a parklike setting around an artificial pond, providing inspiration to chip designers inside, Dai said. Chip design is ``an art,'' he noted: ``It requires a lot of imagination and creativity.''
Four years ago, fewer than 100 chip-design firms existed in China. Now there are more than 400 -- a quarter of them are in Shanghai -- designing for Chinese and global electronics companies.
The Chinese semiconductor industry is looking to Silicon Valley for capital, design expertise, technology and management, while it gets manufacturing skills, marketing and sales from Taiwan.
``We want to create a new golden triangle between Silicon Valley, Shanghai and Taiwan,'' said Dai Haibo, deputy magistrate of the government of Pudong, the vast industrial area of eastern Shanghai where many chip companies are located.
Spreadtrum, another Shanghai chip-design start-up with strong valley connections, focuses on China's burgeoning mobile-phone market. Datong Chen, Spreadtrum's co-founder, returned to China last year with a wealth of experience from U.S. tech companies, including National Semiconductor and OmniVision.
Many in China's new generation of chip designers and entrepreneurs are ethnic Chinese who glide effortlessly between Silicon Valley, Taiwan and Shanghai.
``We have a root connection to China. We want to do something for China,'' Chen said. Chip design, he added, ``is just the beginning.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercurynews.com |
