Alibaba Fuels China's CPU Gambit

C-Sky to leverage Alibaba's investment, Yun OS

Junko Yoshida, EETimes
6/20/2017 03:11 PM EDT

AUSTIN, Texas — C-Sky Microelectronics Co., designer of China’s home-grown 32-bit embedded CPU processing cores, is quite possibly China’s best kept secret.

Although little known in the United States, C-Sky (C stands for “China”), founded in Hangzhou in 2001, had already shipped 500 million of its embedded CPUs by the end of last year. The cores have found a home in a variety of embedded systems — ranging from set-top boxes to IC cards and printers, according to Xiaoning Qi, CEO of C-Sky.

C-Sky’s core business is designing a 32-bit high-performance and low-power embedded CPU, then licensing the chip architecture. Since 2003, when it rolled out its first CPU core called CK510, C-Sky has been quietly developing a host of embedded cores, SoC platforms, software tools and middleware. The company, now offering seven cores, has picked 70 licensees so far in China.

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