Three Charts from U.S. Institutions Show China’s Strength in Chip Research

The tightening of U.S. restrictions on chip exports to China has motivated Chinese researchers to work even harder on their studies. ETO, a project of Georgetown University, analyzed global research papers on chip design and manufacturing from 2018 to 2023. It found that institutions from China occupy most of the top 10 rankings for published papers and citations. Below is the report summary.

April 22, 2025

ETO

A project of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University.

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Key findings

Hundreds of thousands of chip design and fabrication research papers were released between 2018 and 2023. 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.

Chip design and fabrication research: steady, not skyrocketing

Estimated articles published per year, rounded to thousands: chip design and fabrication and selected comparison fields

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.

Leading countries in chip design and fabrication research

Top-cited research = the 10% of articles in each year with the most citations. Note that some articles lack information about author nationality, and articles without English titles or abstracts are omitted.

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.