Yang Cheng

Deng Zhonghan, commander-in-chief of the "Starlight China Chip Project," was granted another award last week.

This one is from the Zhongguancun Administrative Committee, coming after Deng's team was recognized with a State Science and Technology Award in March.

The government-backed project was undertaken by Deng's company, Vimicro Co, a start-up firm based in Beijing's Zhongguancun, known as China's silicon valley.

A series of chips developed by the team, breaking through seven core technologies in the sector, has broken up foreign developer's stranglehold in the global chip market.

The core technologies include some 400 patents, and within six years, Vimicro was the No 5 largest patent holder in the nation's capital last year.

Deng says the moment he most remembers was when President Hu Jintao presented him with the State Science and Technology Award in March.

"President Hu shook my hand and said: 'It's hard for overseas-returned scholars to research and develop chips.'

"I was too moved and exited to speak, and later I replied that we have sold a total of 38 million chips to the world and we own about 400 patents," Deng recalled.

Insiders say that 38 million is indeed a sizable figure in chip market, and will have far-reaching and lasting influence on the sector. The company's personal computer camera-embedded multimedia signal processing chips have been widely adopted by world information technology giants, such as Samsung, Philips, Hewlitt Packard and Lenovo, which together occupy over 60 per cent of world market.

Moreover, the success of the project not only proves Chinese researchers' strength in research and development in the area, but also showcases their pursuit of independent intellectual property rights (IPR).

"We place IPR as a key priority in our work," Deng said.

Project engineers never regard their achievements as "innovation" but "invention," according to Zhang Hui, deputy commander-in-chief of the project.

Deng said IPR barriers are one of the biggest problems facing China's chip industry.

"It is hard to foster technology, since many companies own thousands of patents. Various competitions, merger and acquisition cases hinge on them," he said.

Deng said the biggest difficulty confronted with his cutting-edge project is human resources, and he was once quoted by sohu.com as saying that the flow of human resources, venture capital and the establishment of new enterprises all hinge on IPR.

Thanks to precise market positioning, the patents of the "Starlight China Chip Project" have achieved astonishing feats in world's computer camera, camera in mobile phones, video-phones and digital cameras arenas.

"Every year, we apply for tens to hundreds of patents, and we constantly focus our sights on progress in core technology breakthroughs and the profound effects of their commercialization."

Background

The "Starlight China Chip Project" was initiated in 1999. It was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Information Industry, the National Development and Reform Commission, the China Association for Science and Technology and the Beijing municipal government.

Vimicro Co was founded to undertake the project in 1999. Most of engineers involved in the project are overseas-returned scholars.

The project was launched in a bid to develop China's independent IPR in the chip industry.

To date, the project has proposed complete multimedia date structures, processing methods, chip structures and designs and embedded software technologies.

It has enabled the nation for the first time to realize the integration between standards and core technologies in this area.

The low cost of the monocrystal methods helps reduce overhead in related multimedia technologies. It has laid a solid foundation for the standardization, popularization and service for 3C (three-way convergence for computer, communication and consumer) multimedia services in China.

(China Daily 04/18/2005 page5)