China is winning the chip war with the US – on paper

China produces more chip design and fabrication research papers then the next three ranked countries combined.

Chinese authors are releasing more than a third (34%) of papers on semiconductor design and fabrication, a report by the Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO) at Georgetown University has revealed.

Between 2018 and 2023, scholars produced 473,000 of these papers globally, 161,000 of which were written by Chinese authors. This number is over two times higher than that of the US (72,000). Researchers in India and Japan published 40,000 and 30,000 articles respectively.

The overall output of chip research grew by 8% in five years.

China also claims a top spot for the most cited chip design and fabrication articles, with a share of over 50%.

“Nine of the top ten biggest producers of chip research between 2018-2023 are Chinese research institutions, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with 14,387 articles released between 2018 and 2023,” the report reads.

Some of the highest-cited articles focus on two-dimensional materials used in semiconductor applications, such as graphene and MXenes, superconductivity, perovskite nanocrystals, and transition metals.

Many research efforts focus on “post-Moore's law” semiconductors, reflecting concern about looming limits to traditional chip technologies.

“For several decades, the semiconductor industry has pursued an exploratory research agenda knowing that eventually complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-based semiconductor device manufacturing would reach atomic limits: the point at which we cannot physically fit more transistors on silicon integrated circuits,” ETO explains.

Other “hot topics” include semiconductors built around new computation models, such as neuromorphic computing, technologies used for more efficient architectures and packaging, and photonics.

China also leads in AI research papers, AI journals, conferences, and repository publications, as revealed by Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report.

Cybernews previously analyzed the US and China’s positions in the race for self-reliance and chip technology domination, and research is only one of the pieces. The US is ahead in chip design and actual products, while China controls a large part of the supply chain, including rare earths. Both countries rely on the fabs in Taiwan for the most advanced chips.