China has become the world’s No.1 country in publishing semiconductor-related papers, more than the following three ranked countries combined, according to a report published by the Emerging technology Observatory (ETO) at Georgetown University.
The ETO report said that from 2018 to 2023, Chinese scholars published 160,852 academic articles, more than the US (71,688), India (39,709), Japan (30,401), and South Korea (28,345). Regarding the number of citations per article, the US achieved 17.6, compared with China’s 14.8.
All the top 10 research organisations were based in China, except France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which ranked No.3.
From 2018 to 2023, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) published 14,387 chip-related articles, followed by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (7,849), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (5,446), and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (5,237).
However, China only ranked fifth globally regarding the number of papers published by chip makers.
Samsung published 1,940 articles from 2018 to 2023, followed by STMicroelectronics (1,070), Intel (951), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC, 611) and China Electronic Technology Group Corp (CETC, 594).
In terms of the number of citations per article, Intel achieved 17.3, followed by Samsung (16.8), IBM (15.4), and Samsung (16.8). CETC ranked only 10th.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP), owned by Alibaba’s co-founder Jack Ma, reported on the ETO report with the headline“Tech war: China leads US in quantity, quality of semiconductor research, report finds.” It referred to“quantity” as Chinese researchers’ high number of citations per article.
Zachary Arnold, a lead analyst at the ETO, told Nature magazine that although the study’s findings do not mean that China is currently leading the chip-making field,“it’s showing us where things are headed.”
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