Tsinghua Adds Marvell Stake To Lattice and Imagination

The size of the Marvell stake is not stated but It must be at least 5% which is the level required for disclosure under SEC rules.

Last month Tsinghua bought a 6% stake in Lattice which it has since increased to 8.65%.

This strategy of buying small stakes in chip companies is a departure from Tsinghua’s earlier practice of making full-scale takeover bids.

It bought Omnivision outright for $1.9 billion and ISSI for $640 million.

The wheels seem to come off the full-scale takeover strategy when Tsinghua’s $23 billion bid for Micron came up against US regulatory scrutiny.

Then a bid for MediaTek was blocked by Taiwanese regulators and Tsinghua responded with bids to take 25% stakes in three Taiwan assembly houses ChipMos, Powertech and SPIL. All three are running into trouble with regulators.

Meanwhile a Tsinghua bid to buy 15% of Western Digital was withdrawn when US regulators made unfriendly noises.

Trying to get into the semiconductor business has been a long, painful and expensive saga for China and these acquisitions don’t look like making significant inroads into its huge chip trade deficit.

Buying GloFo would help of course and the prospect of such a deal is ever-present. But getting its hands in first-rate IC design companies seems to be something that national regulators are going to oppose.

Of course the best solution is to grow its own IC industry but that takes disruptive,free thinking engineers and while there are plenty of Chinese engineers who are disruptive and free-thinking they are working in Silicon Valkey.

So China has to develop its own innovation culture which means its citizens have to be allowed to think and this is something the China government is mightily afraid of.

As Mentor CEO Wally Rhines told the recent European GSA Forum: ““China is not encouraging freedom of thought and that’s something you need if you want innovation.”