Electronics group VeriSilicon Holdings Co Ltd signed an investment agreement on Dec 17 to build a research and development center in the Lin-gang Special Area in East China's Shanghai city.

Founded in 2001, VeriSilicon is a Shanghai-headquartered computer chip designer and manufacturer. It designs and manufactures silicon processors for consumer electronics devices and smart phones, tablets and set top boxes among other things.

The firm has existing R&D centers in China and in the United States and works as a contractor to other computer chip companies, helping them complete additional parts of semiconductor designs.

With a total investment of 1.3 billion yuan ($204 million), the project will be committed to building internet protocol platforms and providing customers with more complete customized solutions.

Taking advantage of its appealing industry and talent policies, as well as the collaborative atmosphere of the integrated circuits industry in the Lin-gang Special Area, VeriSilicon is expected to optimize its R&D funds, technologies and workforce and to boost its research capabilities.

In the wake of the VeriSilicon venture, Lin-gang is also expected to attract more leading chip-designing companies from around the world to settle there. This is seen as helping to coordinate the upstream and downstream areas of the IC industries in the Lin-gang Special Area.

In addition, the cooperation will speed up the industrialization and innovation of the domestic fifth generation of Reduced Instruction Set, or RISC-V chips – the open-source processor technology that competes with ARM, the most widely used family of microprocessors worldwide.

Moreover, the move is expected to play an important role in building a world-class industrial cluster for IC in the area.