'China is going to repeat the story of Taiwan'

John Deng is a pioneer, but he doesn't always see himself as one. Deng credits the early shakers and movers of Silicon Valley's fabless scene as the real point men. Modesty aside, in China Deng and his multimedia-chip company, Vimicro Corp., are fast-rising stars that show little chance of winking out.

In 1997, Deng left UC Berkeley with a sheaf of degrees under his arm. IBM snapped him up to work at the T.J. Watson Research Center for a while, but Deng soon left to co-found Pixim Inc., a Silicon Valley digital-imaging technology firm. He didn't last long there, either, itching to return to China for what he thought was a bright future back home.

Before China fever broke out in earnest, Deng hit the fund-raising circuit, looking for seed money to start Beijing-based Vimicro, a designer of mobile multimedia processors for the booming digital camera and cell phone markets. It was tough going, since the Internet was the only thing that mattered to investors at the time, not ICs and China. Eventually, though, Deng persuaded China's powerful Ministry of Information Industry to make its first venture investment in his startup.

Of course, these days things are different. Everything in China—real or imagined—is hot now. Vimicro is real. Its board includes an Oracle director and a Berkeley professor. The company has also filed an initial public offering on the Nasdaq, making it one of the first two Chinese fabless companies to do so.

Deng is indicative of a larger wave of disruption that will reshape the semiconductor industry in the next 10 to 20 years: a smart, capable, business-savvy guy who is joining with his classmates—and other engineers and entrepreneurs—to refine the raw talent China has to offer.

"China is going to repeat the story of Taiwan and many of the companies there," Deng said. "We will do it in a similar way, but bigger in scale."

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