Designed in China. The next big thing?

China's emergence as a 'next Silicon Valley' had many flavors at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. There, companies like Huawei, Haier, Lenovo and scores of other home-grown Chinese brands touted new mobile phones, tablet PCs, smart TVs and other gadgets for the growing global consumer electronics sector.

The China tech story is not just about the mass manufacturing and mass marketing of  consumer electronics devices. In China today, design engineers are rapidly gravitating toward the fabless semiconductor model.

It's a big business and technology shift for Chinese electronics makers, but it will, inexorably, help position China's native suppliers, which are legion, to create much higher value products for both the home and export markets. Japan and Korea will feel this soon and are well aware that they will be facing a much more competitive China in the extremely price sentive global consumer electronics marketpalce in the years ahead.

To learn more about this technology trend in China, The Next Silicon Valley interviewed Peter Clarke, European News Director of EE Times in the UK this week. Clarke, who has been writing about electronics since 1984, is an authority on both the business and the technology of the global semiconductor industry.

He's also co-author of the EE Times Confidential China Fabless Profile, an insightful, in-depth analysis of the fabless chip design ecosystems now forming up in China.

Design equals value, and Clarke's reporting and data show that China is carefully and methodically going down the fabless semiconductor learning curve in order to master the art and science of fabless chip design.

Designed in China will eventuall be a really big big thing.

Clarke puts new and ongoing developments in the China fabless sector into timely, global perspective and examines the 'hot pursuit' business models that are reshapping China's rising profile in the consumer electronics sector.  Android is a big player here, and Clarke explains why it has opened the door to a new wave of products and designs, and how it is reshapping the global semiconductor landscape.