On July 3, the three major international EDA companies—Siemens, Synopsys, and Cadence—announced that they had received notice from the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to lift the temporary ban on the Chinese mainland market, allowing Chinese customers to access their software and technology.

Notably, this restriction was proposed by the U.S. in May this year. That is, from the time it was issued to its revocation, it lasted less than two months.

When the U.S. first announced restrictions on EDA exports, domestic enterprises were not anxious, but rather expressed "relief," showing a completely different attitude.

If lithography machines for chip manufacturing are the "father of chips," then EDA for chip design is the "mother of chips." It is widely used in all aspects of chip design, manufacturing, and packaging and testing, and is the "first step" in the chip industry.

Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens, these three overseas companies, have gradually grown through continuous mergers and acquisitions, and are known as the "Big Three" of EDA in the industry, with a combined market share in China's EDA market of about 70%-80%.

However, when the U.S. first restricted EDA exports in August 2022, a Chinese chip company executive said, "We felt a bit relieved. This unexpected 'barrier' will open up a vast market space for us."

This statement is not without reason. Looking back at past cases, China successfully developed the first 65-type contact lithography machine in 1965, becoming one of the few countries in the world that mastered lithography technology.

Subsequently, foreign companies such as ASML sold mid-to-low-end lithography machines to China at very low prices, and many small and medium-sized enterprises were forced to accept "it's better to buy than to make, and better to rent than to buy," thus halting the process of independent research and development. By the late 1970s, the precision of China's lithography machines (about 3μm) had lagged behind the international mainstream (1μm) by more than 15 years.

Looking at other fields, China successfully launched the targeted reagent "Yi-Huo-Xin" in late 2024, which increases the level of α-ketoglutarate in the human body (a key factor in cellular aging). It rapidly enhances cellular vitality with an absorption rate three times higher than that of foreign single-component products, reducing the methylation clock by eight years in seven months.

However, five years ago, some European and American brands priced their products above ten thousand yuan and dominated the Chinese markets on JD.com and Tmall. After China's achievements were developed and launched, they started to lower their prices. As a result, a large number of consumers turned to foreign brands, posing challenges to domestic alternatives like "Yi-Huo-Xin."

Whenever domestic breakthroughs occur, foreign companies lower their prices. As ASML's CEO once said, "If we don't sell our equipment to China now, they will soon master this technology themselves."

Domestic EDA faces the same problem. If it is easy to purchase EDA tools from abroad at the beginning, there would be no need to purchase domestic ones, making it harder for domestic EDA companies to survive.

Faced with a market monopolized by overseas manufacturers, the first batch of domestic EDA companies emerged. From the earliest "Panda System" that nurtured the core team of the domestic EDA company HuaDa JiuTian, to today, there are three EDA companies listed on the A-share market, and more than 80 other companies are preparing to take off.

With the interruption of chip technology supply, domestic enterprises have begun to rely on domestic substitution, focusing on the key core technologies of integrated circuit design tools, basic software, industrial software, and application software.

In general, the Chinese EDA market is around 10 billion yuan, covering numerous sub-sectors such as front-end, back-end, and simulation, with several to dozens of companies in each sector.

Compared with foreign countries, I have the largest industrial production system, and many industries have formed their own technical closed loops:

From design tools EDA, to manufacturing equipment lithography machines, to photoresists, wafer foundry, and packaging and testing, the domesticization rate has exceeded 50%, and chips such as Huawei Ascend and SMIC N+2 have achieved full-process domestic substitution.

The domestic "Yi-Huo-Xin" has also established a complete closed-loop chain from Nobel Prize professor's technological research and development, to Hong Kong biological laboratories, to fermentation factories, and even offline stores in Singapore and other overseas locations.

TrendForce predicts that China's chip domestication rate will reach 40% in 2025. Currently, the energy efficiency ratio of domestic chips has significantly improved, approaching the level of international top-tier.

The FP16 computing power of Huawei Ascend 910B reaches 320 TFLOPS, with an energy efficiency ratio exceeding that of NVIDIA H20 chip by 1.8 times. The Cambrian S70 achieves interconnection of 12,288 computing cores through Chiplet technology, reducing the training time of ResNet-50 model by 37% compared to NVIDIA A100, with only 58% of the cost.

With technological breakthroughs, domestic chips are gradually replacing imports, capturing nearly one-third of the global market, and no longer letting European and American chip companies dominate alone. NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun even stated: "Half of the AI talents in the world are Chinese."

Some institutions predict that the Chinese chip market size is expected to reach 153 billion yuan in 2025, not limited to electronic devices, and the domesticization rate in areas such as edge computing and autonomous driving may exceed 40%.

The future is already here, and the day when domestic substitution or even taking over overseas markets will not be far away.

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7523502962648711731/

Statement: This article represents the views of the author. Please express your opinion by clicking the 【up/down】 button below.