SZ's IC industry posts steady growth momentum

The hustle and bustle of an electronics fair in Shenzhen. File photo

Shenzhen, as China’s tech innovation center, is the distribution, application and design centers of China’s integrated circuits (ICs) and has seen its IC industry maintain rapid development in recent years.

In particular, the city’s IC design industry has been prominent, boasting leading storage products as well as assembly and testing capabilities that lead the country, Shenzhen Special Zone Daily reported Wednesday.

Shenzhen Longsys Electronics Co. Ltd., a technology-based storage product supplier dedicated to memory chip architecture and application, has become an industry leader in the domestic memory field.

Longsys, founded in 1999, has focused on the storage field over the years. With heavy R&D investment and continuous technological innovation, Longsys has several self-developed products whose market shares are among the highest on the world market. This August, Longsys was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

According to statistics, Longsys’ cumulative revenue over the past three years surpassed 22.7 billion yuan (US$3.26 billion), and both the company’s revenue and profits have grown rapidly.

With the rise of emerging fields such as AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things), big data, cloud computing, intelligent manufacturing, smart vehicles and digital economy, the demand for memory chips has grown steadily in recent years, creating opportunities for Shenzhen storage product suppliers.

From general storage, embedded storage to solid-state storage, after over 10 years’ development, YEESTOR Microelectronics Co. Ltd. has become the only company on the Chinese mainland to mass produce storage controllers of complete product lines.

“Since the R&D of the first-generation storage controller in 2007, the processing has developed from 300 nm and 180 nm to 14 nm and 12 nm, and more advanced semiconductor processing will be utilized in the future,” said Luo Ting, marketing director of YEESTOR Microelectronics.

According to Luo, China’s design capability of storage controllers is close to that of leading foreign enterprises after years of development, and Shenzhen’s storage industry ecosystem is constantly optimized, which will certainly cultivate world-class enterprises in the future.

Statistics from Shenzhen Semiconductor Industry Association (SZSIA) showed that in 2021, the city’s IC industry’s main business income exceeded 140 billion yuan, with the IC design industry’s revenue exceeding 70 billion yuan.

“With the steady development of 5G, artificial intelligence, new energy vehicles, Internet of Things and intelligent manufacturing, the strength of Shenzhen’s IC design industry has been growing,” Chang Junfeng, SZSIA’s secretary general, was quoted as saying.

Nanshan District, for instance, has gathered nearly 50% of the city’s IC design enterprises, according to Chang.