Independent Design Houses in China

A 2012 Report on Understanding the Trends and Value Proposition of the IDH Sector in the China Market

By Glenn ImObersteg and Bruce Rayner, Embedded Developer LLC,
Steve Cholas, Hearst Electronics, and Hector Lui, 21IDH

In August and September 2011, Embedded Developer LLC, the leading

MCU and tools evaluation site, in cooperation with 21IC, China’s leading

site for engineers, and 21IDH, the leading site for Independent

Design Houses in China, conducted a ground-breaking survey to gain

an in-depth understanding of the trends driving the growth and

evolution of China’s Independent Design House (IDH) sector. The

survey gathered input from over 800 respondents representing all

sectors of the electronics industry, including 245 IDHs, 504 customers,

17 component suppliers and 62 distributors and traders.

A series of two dozen interviews with industry executives complemented

the survey results to provide a fuller picture of this dynamic

service sector that has become a vital part of today’s product design

and development process in China’s electronics industry.

China’s IDHs have relationships with all parts of the electronics value

chain. They play a key role in supporting the design and development

efforts of their customers in virtually all sectors of the electronics

industry.

Their customers include original equipment makers (OEMs), original

design manufacturers (ODMs), and electronics manufacturing services

(EMS) providers.

To a lesser extent, China’s IDHs provide original component

manufacturers (OCMs) and software companies with a channel to

seed the market with their products. And they offer distributors a

channel for generating component sales to the mass market.

While the OCM relationship is central to the IDH business model in

other regions of the world, including North America and Europe, it is

not yet as well developed in China. Instead, China’s IDH sector

emerged to satisfy the demand of local design engineers for evaluation

boards and other design and software services that were not being

met by international OCMs or distributors. Either the products and

services were not available locally or they were too expensive. IDHs

were able to fill this unmet demand at a fraction of the cost of the

OCM. Only recently, have websites such as Embedded Developer LLC’s

21IDH, begun to provide a platform for Chinese design engineers,

IDHs, OCMs and distributors to engage directly, thus helping to spur

the maturation of China’s IDH sector.

Today, 21IDH is the market leader providing access to the broadest

array of IDHs in China and the largest collection of indigenous evaluation

boards, reference designs and other services available to China’s

engineering community.