Table of

Contents
Foreword 4 China Fabless
to Watch 55
Silicon 100:
China Fabless 100 Ranking
The Class of 2023 7
2023 Reveals Three Major
AI Dreams and China’s Trends in China’s IC
Startup Surge Impact Design Industry 56
the Silicon 100 8
Top 10 Analog Companies 58
Company List by Category 14
Top 10 Sensor Companies 61
Geographic Mapping 16
Top 10 AI Companies 64
EE Times Lists 100
Top 10 Memory Companies 67
Emerging Companies
to Watch in 2023 18 Top 10 PMIC Companies 69

Video Interview 54 Top 10 Power Device

Companies 72

Top 10 MCU Companies 75

Top 10 Processor
Companies 78

Top 10 Wireless Companies 81

Top 10 Communication
Companies 84

Masthead 87
3
Silicon
 Foreword
By Anne-FranÇoise Pelé

H ardware is hard, but hardness is gradually softening.

The past year has seen an extraordinary leap in AI capabilities, from natural lan-
guage processing to computer vision, tinyML, autoML and edge computing. In the
meantime, chipmakers are turning to AI to design chips faster, less expensively and
more efficiently. Deloitte Global anticipates that the world’s leading semiconductor
companies could spend $300 million on in-house and third-party AI tools for chip de-
sign in 2023, and it expects the tally to increase by 20% a year over the next four years,
to exceed $500 million in 2026.

EDA vendors have been touting the integration of AI into their design tools, though
there is still progress to be made toward the promised goal of easier hardware. Today,
generative AI seems to be eliminating the “hard” from hardware projects, and Deloitte
Global expects the growth in advanced AI tools for chip design to be more than twice
that of the overall EDA category and more than triple the growth rate of chip sales
over the next five years.

The advent of ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools has taken the venture capital
world by storm. Despite the slowdown in VC funding overall, vast amounts of cash
have started flowing in for generative-AI ventures. Microsoft reportedly injected $10
billion in ChatGPT owner Open AI, building on its historic investment in 2019. Palo Alto,
California-based generative-AI startup Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion in a fresh round
of funding led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and Nvidia. An-
thropic, a San Francisco-based provider of large language models, completed a $450
million Series C round led by Spark Capital with participation from Google.

Money follows money.

And innovation calls for regulation.

The AI regulatory landscape is still in its infancy, but the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act
has set a precedent for AI governance globally. The draft act has adopted a risk-based
approach—unacceptable risk, high risk, limited risk and minimal or no risk.—for the
development, deployment and use of AI. Concern abounds about how such policies
may hamper AI progress, but aren’t constraints a catalyst for innovation?

The Silicon Valley entrepreneurship model is no longer confined to the U.S. From Mu-
nich to Tel Aviv, Leuven to Shanghai and Toronto to London, technology innovation
hubs, business incubators and accelerators are springing up, providing fertile ground
for entrepreneurial ideas to grow.
The EE Times Silicon 100, now in its 23rd edition, has identified where technical expertise
meets continuous innovation and has mapped the geographic patterns. This year’s edi-
tion has also expanded its technological categorization to 24 areas, ranging from materi-
als and packaging at a fundamental extreme to quantum computing and security at the
highest level of abstraction.

Nonetheless, the Silicon 100 is not a ranking of the “best startups” in each category. It
goes beyond subjective factors and provides capital investors, entrepreneurs, business
executives and market analysts with key indicators of continued startup growth.

Peter Clarke, a technology and business journalist who has compiled and curated the
EE Times Silicon 100 list since its inception in 2004, follows economic oscillations and
decrypts the cyclical and countercyclical investment strategies that drive short- and me-
dium-term returns. Clarke provides a who’s who in the rise of electronics and semicon-
ductor startups and connects the dots between technology innovations and business
opportunities.

In the course of his analysis, he addresses key questions such as:

. Can generative AI reenchant hardware design?

. Is quantum winter coming? Myth or reality?
. If unicorns exist, why is Europe failing to produce more of them?
. Why are SiC and GaN opening the next chapter of electronics?
. Is Silicon Valley lying dormant or showing signs of a rebound?
. What is the secret behind China’s startup boom?

The Silicon 100 is now inseparable from the China Fabless 100. For the third year, the
AspenCore China analyst team has waded into the domestic IC design ecosystem and
ranked fabless semiconductor companies based on the organizations’ technical attri-
butes and their growth potential on a national and global scale. The China Fabless 100
is now a critical component of the rational decision-making process for investors and
market professionals.

The past 12 months have been a period of macroeconomic turbulence. Geopolitical ten-
sions, energy market imbalances, higher-than-expected inflation and abrupt spikes in
interest rates have raised concerns that an actual recession might be imminent. With or
without market contraction, the electronics and semiconductor industry has proved to
be resilient and resistant to change. The next 12 months will certainly be no exception, as
a number of world firsts continue to hit the high seas of innovation.

Anne-FranÇoise Pelé
is editor-in-chief of
EE Times Europe.
Silicon

5
The electronics industry is at an inflection point and needs to
define new compute trajectories for energy efficiency.
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