Patent comparison of world and Chinese top fabless semiconductor companies during a business recovery period

As one of business models in semiconductor industry, the fabless model has been widely accepted and adopted as a successful business model since 1990, because of its relatively lower investment and faster rewards. The first fabless company started up in the USA in 1978, while China has its first fabless company in Shanghai in 2001. In order to develop national semiconductor industry, China government issued a series of policies and also provided financial supports. In 2011, under the 12^th 5-year plan, two of thirteen science and technology major specific projects are related to the semiconductor industry. This paper showed the sales revenues of top world and Chinese fabless companies from 2003 to 2010 and compared the patent applications between them, including US patents, China patents, and PCT as well as EPO patents from 2002 to 2011. The problems of Chinese fabless companies faced were discussed in terms of industry scale, technology innovation and the internationalization of R&D. The recommendations for China government decision makers were presented at last.