Top chip design tool makers see China’s auto industry going places and look to leave export restrictions in the dust
- Executives from chip design software firms commented at Semicon China last week about China’s leading position in electric cars
- The auto industry is the fastest-growing consumer of semiconductors, with Asia-Pacific being the fastest-growing region, according to trade group statistics
Chip design software companies are pinning their hopes on China’s growing auto industry and its increasing demand for integrated circuits, executives suggested at Semicon China last week, while the top global players grapple with tightened restrictions on exports to the world’s second-largest economy.
Liu Weiping, founder and chairman of the country’s top chip design tool provider Empyrean Technology, said at the chip conference in Shanghai on Friday that the company is doubling down on building Chinese electronic design automation (EDA) solutions for automotive electronics to capture some of the rapid growth in the intelligent vehicle market.
“There are more and more electronic components in automotives, especially new energy vehicles, that require a large number of components such as chips, displays, and lidar,” Liu said. “All the design of these components need support from EDA software.”
Empyrean Technology, which was founded in 2009 and went public in Shenzhen in July 2022, is viewed as one of China’s best hopes to achieve self sufficiency in the EDA industry. The industry is currently dominated by just four US firms: Cadence, Synopsys, Ansys and Siemens EDA – known as Mentor Graphics before being acquired by Siemens in 2017 – which account for about 90 per cent of the market.
EDA is a category of software tools used for designing advanced integrated circuits, or chips containing billions of transistors, that serve as the “brains” powering everything from modern electric appliances, smartphones and personal computers to sophisticated medical equipment, cars and aircraft.
Danny Perng, senior vice-president of the Pacific Rim at Siemens EDA, also noted the auto industry’s growing importance for chip design.
“The ecosystem of automotive electronics has been changing,” said Perng in another keynote speech at the conference on Friday. “Tier1 [auto] companies such as BYD have ambitions to fully integrate chip design and manufacturing and build their own factories.”
Perng praised Chinese electric vehicle makers for their “leading position” in the global market, which he said has created an excellent opportunity for the development of automotive electronics and semiconductors.