As a heavyweight member in the China semiconductor industry, Tsinghua Unigroup has set ambitious goals of scoring US$100 billion in annual revenues, taking the largest share of the global market for smartphone chipsets, and ranking among the world's top chip design enterprises in five years.

Unigroup is building a science park in Xiamen, a booming IT hub in the southeast coast of China, in collaboration with the Xiamen city government, seeking to develop a new-generation IC industry base there to house more affiliates and quality partners of the group.

The group's chipmaking arm, Unisoc, is seeking to tap into the midrange and high-tier mobile chipset markets through a two-pronged strategy of in-house innovation and international cooperation, according to Qiu Xiaoxin, chief technology officer at Unisoc, an entity formed by merging Spreadtrum Communications & RDA Microelectronics.

Must-do job

Qiu said 5G+ AI will dominate the era following PC, Internet and mobile Internet eras, and it is a must-do job for Unisoc to develop 5G chips. She added that Spreadtrum Communications in 2014 kicked off deployments in 5G chip development and Unisoc is now stepping up 5G chip market deployments.

Unisoc will start trial commercial run for its 5G chips in 2019, scale commercial application in 2020 and large-scale application in 2021, and will move to cooperate with major system vendors in accordance with the timetables, Qiu revealed.

Qiu continued that her company is developing its first Android-based high-end 5G smartphone solution integrating its own solid experience in chipset design with Intel's strong technical expertise in modems.

So far, Unisoc has completed 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT) at Huawei's prototype cell sites in compliance with the latest 3GPP Release 15 Standard, and plans to commercialize eight-core 5G chips in 2019 that can fully support both NSA (non-standalone) and SA communication networks for 5G smartphones.

At the 2018 China IC Summit held in late September, Unisco announced the launch of two new product brands: Unisoc Tiger for mobile communication chips and Unisoc Ivy for pan-connection IoT chips. Qiu said the launch has shown that her company has extended its portfolio to midrange and high-tier chipsets.

Midrange and high-end mobile chips

Qiu disclosed that for mid-tier and high-end mobile communication chipsets, Unisoc has developed four-core SC9850 chip and eight-core SC9863 chip. The former is China's first commercialized midrange smartphone CPU chip developed in-house, and the latter is the company's first AI-based smartphone chipset with NPU (neural processing unit) and stronger CPU performance.

Unisoc now adopts 14nm and 16nm processes for mass production of its chipsets, and will start volume production of 12nm chips in 2019 and focus on 7nm production of 5G chips in 2020, according to Qiu.

Qiu also noted that Unisoc now has over 4,400 employees, with 90% of them being R&D engineers. The company operates 14 technology R&D centers and eight customer support centers around the world.

Over the past 10 years, global chipset markets have been dominated by chipmakers in the US, Japan and Europe, but Qiu believes that China will join the US to enjoy continuous expansion in global market shares in the next 10 years as China-developed chip products are beginning to win patronage from domestic clients.

China's semiconductor industry is estimated to rake in revenues of CNY257.69 billion (US$36.88 billion) in 2018, up 32.32% from CNY194.59 billion in 2017. The sharp revenue growth is expected to effectively spur in-house development of more chip solutions in China despite the country's still high reliance on chip imports, according to Qiu.