A large market, and a small Korean share

System semiconductors, the writer says, are parts on which future industries and services will lean, and their effect spreads widely. The worldwide market for them is, in the notes, about 260 billion dollars, some four times the memory market, yet Korean firms, apart from a few related items such as application processors and CMOS image sensors, have not done much there. Korea’s share of memory, the notes claim, is 51.6 percent; its share of system chips is only 5.1 percent. A country that has come first in memory, the writer argues, now needs to secure a place in system chips, and will hardly do so without government help. Those market figures are the notes’, and are not treated as official totals from a later year.

The notes also give a 2011 reading: system semiconductors then accounted for 81.1 percent of the worldwide semiconductor market, and were still growing. As that market kept expanding, fabless firms rose in standing. Among the world’s thirty largest, the writer finds many firms from the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and Europe, and no Korean name at all. At home, semiconductor sales have grown quickly, the notes say, but the global system-chip share remains thin; the top ten domestic fabless firms showed sales growth of about 27.9 percent. System chips, in this reading, are also a way of joining newer information technology to older industries, and they are moving toward integrated systems-on-a-chip that combine hardware and software. Fields named as likely partners include mobile devices, smart appliances, and energy.

Help from 2013, and what small firms cannot do alone

Unlike Korea, the writer says, countries that saw the importance of this industry early—advanced economies and developing ones alike—have given it large, long, and orderly government support. Starting costs are high, and so are the skills and the people required; a small firm, in this reading, cannot stand up alone. Korea, the notes say, has supported about fifteen billion won a year in research projects in mobile phones and digital appliances. From 2013, a program led by ETRI has built training rooms, intellectual property, and verification environments for fabless firms to use together, with about six billion won a year. Those sums stay in the years the notes give.

To strengthen the industry, the writer turns next to design and verification infrastructure, especially in the mobile, appliance, and automobile fields where system chips are already heavily used. The argument is practical: shared rooms and tools matter because a small design house cannot easily build them on its own.

A second-place neighbor, and a plan the notes will not update

China, the notes say, has come second in the system-chip market after the United States, with tax relief, infrastructure policy, and other combined support, and with a program that links system semiconductors to software in order to raise high-technology as a whole, under the science ministry. A twelfth five-year plan for science and technology, in this telling, named semiconductors and green energy as core fields, and the semiconductor side was given tax benefits and heavy support, including infrastructure, projects, mergers, and the training of people. That plan is left in the notes’ window, and is not rewritten as a later official program.

The writer’s close is that the time for government help has already come, because a thin fabless bench cannot close the gap alone. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student report on system semiconductors, Korea’s memory share and system-chip share, and fabless firms, as the notes give them.
2. A 2011 share of 81.1 percent, an undated worldwide figure of about 260 billion dollars, and ETRI support dated from 2013, left in that window.
3. China’s second-place standing and a twelfth five-year plan, as the notes record them, not updated to a later official account.

Last updated: 14 November 2026