China guidance funds pump $132m into Gowin Semiconductor

Other investors include Guangdong Macao Semiconductor Industry Investment and Shanghai Semiconductor Equipment & Materials Industry Investment Fund. All three are government guidance funds, underlining policy support for the emerging domestic semiconductor industry.

The investment will go to technology R&D, sales and marketing, and operations and management upgrades. Gowin said in a statement that creating financial barriers to entry would help promote the localisation of FPGA chip manufacturing.

Founded in 2014, Gowin specialises in FPGA - or field-programmable gate array - products. These are integrated circuits that can be reconfigured by the customer after manufacturing. FGPA chips play a key role in embedded system development because they facilitate partitioning trials before system architecture is finalised.

Gowin has released more than 100 chips to date across three main product series. Its portfolio includes programmable logic devices, design software, intellectual property cores, reference designs, and development kits. Going forward, there will be a strong focus on serving the automotive industry.

The field is dominated by foreign players like Xilinx, Altera, and Actel. Gowin focuses on domestic substitution, or the replacement of imported products with locally made alternatives. It is the only FGPA player in China to achieve mainstream certification.

In 2021, the Trump administration placed it on a blacklist of supposedly Chinese military-linked companies that are off-limits to US investors. Gowin responded with a lawsuit asserting that the designation was made in error. The Biden administration subsequently removed the company from the list.

 

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
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• China
• semiconductor