What is China trying to grab? The answer is not the chip itself, but the calculation behind it points directly to the dominance of the United States. (Reuters)
[Financial Channel/Comprehensive Report] China is further extending semiconductor competition from chip manufacturing, equipment and materials to "industrial standards." This time, the target is not the most advanced process, but the more basic identification and tracking system in the semiconductor supply chain that may be touched by almost all components. China has recently promoted Micro Han Xin to enter the international standardization process, hoping to use locally developed barcode technology to enter the chip marking market currently dominated by overseas technology.
The South China Morning Post pointed out that China is aiming to gain a foothold in the chip industry and intends to challenge U.S. standards with its tiny Chinese Sensible code.
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It is reported that after China failed to challenge the QR code many years ago, Beijing is currently placing its hopes on its independently developed "micro" version of the barcode to gain a foothold in the global semiconductor supply chain. The State Administration for Market Regulation of China stated that "Micro Han Xin" (Micro Han Xin) has officially entered the international standardization process. This technology is a reduced version of the Han Xin code launched in 2007. It is mainly used for computer and semiconductor components that are too small to be marked using traditional marking methods.
Hanseatic code is a matrix two-dimensional barcode independently developed by China. It is particularly suitable for representing Chinese characters and Chinese information. These ultra-small barcodes can create independent identification information for sensors, microprocessors, controllers, memories and other components, allowing products to be tracked through complex processes such as wafer manufacturing, packaging and testing.
Experts believe that China's move reflects its attempt to reduce its reliance on existing foreign technical standards in high-standard industrial applications. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation also admitted that China’s semiconductor industry is still highly dependent on foreign systems such as Data Matrix. Data Matrix was developed in the United States about 40 years ago and has become a mainstream global standard for marking and tracking semiconductors, silicon wafers and electronic components.
In fact, Hanxin Code tried to replace the widely used QR Code in the past, but ultimately failed to become popular. The QR Code developed in Japan has become the de facto standard in mobile payment, logistics and other fields. Today, China has chosen to re-adjust the battlefield and shift its target to the smaller and more technically demanding semiconductor component identification market.
The State Administration for Market Regulation of the People’s Republic of China claims that the Micro Hanseatic Code can reach or even surpass the Data Matrix in terms of information density and damage resistance, and can accommodate dozens to more than 100 numbers or characters in a space that is almost difficult to discern with the naked eye. China plans to incorporate this technology into future revisions of ISO/IEC 20830, a standard that regulates the overall technical requirements for Hanseatic code. The formal revision process has been launched at the end of May and is expected to take about two years to complete.
In April this year, representatives from the China Article Coding Center also introduced the miniature Chinese code at the International Automatic Identification Standards Conference, and then the working group passed a resolution to start standardization work. The center is China's official organization responsible for the management of commodity barcodes, item coding and automatic identification systems.
However, achieving international standard status and being widely adopted by the industry are still two different things. The global semiconductor supply chain has already established a large number of existing identification systems, and the introduction of new standards may face considerable resistance. The global standards organization GS1 assessed in 2021 that the usage rate and global scanner support of Hanseatic Code outside China are still quite limited, but it also believes that its encoding efficiency has the opportunity to make the symbol size smaller than QR Code and Data Matrix.
In the past, QR Code surpassed Hanse Code due to its huge daily application scale. This time, Beijing has narrowed the battlefield to chip manufacturing, hoping to gain opportunities to enter the global supply chain in the more professional semiconductor application field by relying on technical characteristics such as information density, size, and damage resistance.
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