The state of global chip research

ETO's Research Almanac tracks global trends in research across critical technology domains, mapping growth trends and identifying leading companies, research institutions and companies. In prior posts, we used the Almanac to explore global trends in AI safety research and cybersecurity. Today, we'll take a high-level look at the latest subject added to the Research Almanac: chip design and fabrication.

Key findings

• Hundreds of thousands of chip design and fabrication research papers were released between 2018 and 2023, but the field isn't growing as fast as hotter topics like AI.
• China produces by far the most chip design and fabrication research publications, with more papers from 2018-2023 than the next three countries combined.
• China also leads in top-cited chip publication output, with half of the top-cited articles featuring authors from Chinese organizations and universities.
• Most recent growth in published chip design and fabrication research came from China and India, while research output from most other countries actually shrunk over time.

Note that ETO's Research Almanac only considers public research publications, which does not include patents or industry-internal research. This is especially relevant for chip design and fabrication, where much of the work happens in industry, so we are only analyzing one aspect of the overall picture here.

Overall trends

• According to the latest data from the Research Almanac, about 475,000 chip design and fabrication-related articles were released between 2018 and 2023. (This total, and the other Research Almanac-derived findings in this post, are based on articles with English titles or abstracts in our Merged Academic Corpus; they omit articles without English abstracts and non-public research. For further details and caveats, see the Almanac documentation).
• Chip research grew 8% overall between 2018 and 2023. That's slower growth than in hot research areas like AI or LLMs.

Country trends

• 15% of the chip design and fabrication-related articles in the Research Almanac dataset had authors from American institutions. 34% had Chinese authors, and 18% had European authors. (Note that some articles lack information about author institutions and countries affiliation, and our analysis excludes articles without English abstracts, which could affect the numbers for Chinese authors.) The top producer - China - is far ahead of the next most prolific nations (led by the US).
• Looking only at highly cited articles, China again claims the top spot. 50% of top-cited chip design and fabrication articles (defined as the 10% of articles in each publication year with the most citations) had Chinese-affiliated authors, compared to 22% with U.S-affiliated authors and 17% with European-affiliated authors. After China and the U.S., South Korea and Germany claim a distant third and fourth place respectively.

Top organizations

• Nine of the top ten biggest producers of chip research between 2018-2023 are Chinese research institutions, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with 14,387 articles released between 2018 and 2023. (Again, we count only English-language articles - Chinese organizations' counts would likely be higher still if Chinese-language articles were included.)
• When only highly cited articles are counted, Chinese organizations hold the top 8 spots. By the metric we're using here - number of recent publications in the top decile, by citation count, of all chip design and fabrication papers from the same period - the world leaders are the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua University.
• Other prolific producers include the National University of Singapore and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), the latter of which is the third top producer of chip research by article count.

Hot topics

Some common themes appear in the Almanac's top-cited articles list, which includes the ten highest-cited chip design and fabrication articles published between 2018 and 2023. Several of these articles focus on two-dimensional materials used in semiconductor applications, such as graphene and MXenes. Transition metals also feature prominently in the list, including studies of ferromagnetic transition metals and transition metal dichalcogenides.

To get a more comprehensive view of hot topics in chip design and fabrication research, we can turn to the Map of Science, ETO's tool for exploring global research in detail.

As always, we're glad to help you make the most of the Almanac and our other ETO tools - visit our support hub to contact us, book live support with an ETO staff member or access the latest documentation for our tools and data. 🤖