Looking further afield for inspiration and innovation

Borrowing experiences from Silicon Valley in the United States and Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong province, Jiangbei New Area in Jiangsu's provincial capital of Nanjing is devoted to improving services for better business development.

One effort is the Nanjing Integrated Circuit Industry Service Center, which was founded in 2016 in Jiangbei. The center, also known as ICisC, is a public service platform for the integrated circuit industry.

It offers services including human resources, technology, finance and marketing. The center's officials said it has integrated resources from home and abroad, to offer one-stop services to enterprises and help to upgrade the local IC industry.

The center has a 7,000-square-meter training base for local personnel in the IC industry.

The training base has cooperated with seven higher-learning institutions, including Nanjing University, Southeast University and Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, to form a microelectronics training alliance.

It has also teamed up with vocational colleges to establish an alliance for training IC professionals.

With programs offered online and offline, the base's major subjects include IC design, testing, manufacturing and other applications.

To date, the base has offered training classes for about 5,000 people.

Meanwhile, the ICisC has encouraged high-caliber professionals from the rest of China and overseas to work with local companies and institutions.

To make the IC industry in Jiangbei New Area better known to university students in China, the ICisC has organized a number of collegiate IC design contests.

Nearly 5,000 students from 100 universities and colleges across China have attend Jiangbei events. Many have shown an interest in this new hub, according to ICisC officials.

Despite its great market potential, officials admitted the IC industry is hindered by a short supply of qualified professionals and core technologies.

The new area's collaboration with institutions and companies to offer training programs and curriculum can help overcome the short supply of talent, local officials said.

To solve the bottleneck in core technologies, the ICisC, as well as the administration of Jiangbei New Area, has taken multiple measures.

One is the establishment of public technological service platforms.

The platforms include an electronics design automation center, an IC research and development laboratory, an internet of things applications lab and an IC instruments and information center.

These facilities aim to help enterprises improve their R&D capability and efficiency through sharing resources.

The facilities have also helped substantially cut R&D costs, said the officials.

They estimate the saving of corporate expenditure amounted to more than 100 million yuan ($14.5 million) in the past few years.

Another significant facility to help startups grow is the 5,000-sq-m "chip incubator" for innovation and entrepreneurship, which allows companies to start R&D when they are in the construction stage.

To learn from the experiences of others, the ICisC has organized events for brainstorming, networking and information sharing during the past three years.

These include annual meetings for the Chinese semiconductor market in 2017 and 2018, a forum for the development of China's IC professionals, the 2017 Sino-German smart manufacturing conference and the 2017 SOI Technology Summit.

Jiangbei officials said the new area has plans to improve the local business environment to attract more big-name companies from China and overseas.

For instance, the new area is planning for specific industrial parks to host businesses of various segments. These would include an industrial and technological R&D park for IC development, the Nanjing Software Park for IC and software design and the Pukou Economic Development Zone for wafer production and testing.

The local government predicts the output of Jiangbei's IC industry will reach 100 billion yuan this year. The new area will gather more than 300 enterprises and 10,000 professionals in the sector.

The 100-billion-yuan benchmark means that Jiangbei will become one of the leading IC bases in China, local officials said.