China goes for big in semiconductor

It is reported in the media, China's Tsinghua Unigroup is planning a acquisition bid to buy Micron for US$23 billion. This offer clearly shows China's super-fast growth plans in chip industry. China imports huge amount of chips but sells back to the world by using them in the electronics systems it exports. Many US made chips enter China and enter back into US by embedding themselves in products like smart phones to PCs to many such products. Not only for business reason, but due to strategic reason, China is focusing on building local chip manufacturing capability. China has lot of fabless design companies. China SMIC makes 28nm chips and is planning to make 16nm/14nm by 2020. SMIC, Huawei, Imec, and Qualcomm have invested to form a new company called SMIC Advanced Technology Research & Development (Shanghai) Corporation to build 14nm chips in China. Majority is owned by SMIC, while Huawei, Imec, and Qualcomm will be minority shareholders. Imec to provide know-how in advanced semiconductor processing technology. While this is about logic chip manufacturing. China is looking for acquisition in memory segment. China based Uphill Investment recently acquired a small sized US based SRAM vendor ISSI and could win over Cypress Semiconductor's higher bid for ISSI. But the Micron case is little different. To give you some more analysis on semiconductor memory indust...