China's dream for chip supremacy: Seeing through the lens of panel display-related IC patents

Abstract As China has made it a top priority to enrich and upgrade its chip capabilities across the value chain, some international observers predict that China's semiconductor industry will eventually, if not immediately, surpass its foreign competitors. Others remain skeptical about its presumed tech supremacy for plausible but largely speculative reasons. Is the Chinese semiconductor industry a game-changer or a paper tiger? Is China's indigenous chip technology attractive to, and usable by, foreign technology? One way to look into these half-empty/half-full questions is to comparatively analyze chip patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The target domain of this study is integrated circuits (IC) technology, especially thin-film-transistor circuits, where China has recently registered a sharp growth in patent publications. Using the modified forward citation indices of panel display-related IC patents, this study examines whether and to what extent the quantitative growth in the Chinese semiconductor industry has been translated into a gravitational force to pull foreign industries within its sphere of influence. Estimation results of a zero-inflated negative binomial regression analysis show that a Chinese chip patent has a fewer expected modified forward citation index than a non-Chinese patent. These findings indicate that the technological gap between China and advanced countries will take longer to close despite China's accelerated campaign for chip supremacy. This study concludes, with some caveats, that China faces the dual challenge of achieving higher productivity and greater self-reliance, while having to survive in the escalating technological competition with other advanced countries.