In the high-tech industry ushered in the eruptive growth stage, the semiconductor industry has also entered a white-hot. Since 21 years, due to the shortage of supply in the chip market, the shortage of chips has become an urgent problem to be solved. Major chip foundries are also expanding their production scale.
Huawei's chip problem
But on this stall, Lao Mei modified the "chip rules" and cut off the supply chain of Huawei's 5G chips, which made Huawei's mobile phone sales business suffer a great impact.
In the new generation of the Internet, users are also increasingly pursuing the timeliness of information, and have higher requirements for the efficiency of the network. According to market research, most users are more willing to choose 5G mobile phones when choosing a new mobile phone.
Although Huawei's 5G chip is independently developed, Huawei only provides the design and does not produce itself. First, the amount of investment required to build a chip manufacturing plant is huge, and it takes a lot of manpower and material resources to create a complete chip production chain.
On the other hand, as the core field of the high-tech industry, the requirements for technology are very high, and their own production is far less relaxed than that of others.
Huawei's chips are basically handed over to TSMC. However, due to the fact that TSMC wants to produce 5G chips, some of them must use the technology of laomei, due to technical limitations, TSMC cannot freely ship to Huawei.
From September 20 to now, a year and a half has passed, Huawei can only turn to Qualcomm because it can't get 5G chips, but Qualcomm can only provide shipments of 4G chips.
This has also led to a large number of loss of high-end machine users, one is due to the lack of Kirin 9000 chips, Mate 40 flagship machine has been in a state of shortage, many users have the heart to buy can not buy, and the later release of P50 mobile phone is 5G mobile phone can only be used as 4G.
Many users can't wait, and turn to the embrace of Apple's mobile phone. A large part of Huawei's domestic mobile phone consumer market is occupied by Apple.
Regarding the problem of mobile phone chips, Huawei has also been actively looking for solutions.
Huawei officially stated its position on the chip issue
On March 28, Huawei held the 2021 annual report press conference, and Huawei made an official statement on the chip issue. When asked by the media about the chip, Guo Ping, huawei's rotating chairman, said: "Solving the chip problem is a complex and lengthy process, which requires patience, and in the future, our chip solution may use a multi-core structure to improve chip performance." ”
Because the mobile phone has very high requirements for chip performance, not only requires a small size, but also the need for strong computing power and low power consumption, Huawei currently has a certain difficulty in making such a chip.
Huawei also said that in the future, it will use a less advanced process to produce chips, and use stacking and area in exchange for performance improvements. At present, we are actively discussing the sustainable development plan of mobile phones with relevant parties, and Huawei will continue to take the scientific research and innovation route and increase the recruitment of talents.
So can Huawei's stacking scheme succeed?
For huawei's less advanced stacking process, in fact, TSMC and Apple have used it.
TSMC's 3D packaging technology uses huawei's stacking process to package two low-process chips together through advanced 3D packaging technology to increase the number of transistors to enhance the conductivity of the chip and improve chip performance. This technology has been tested to prove feasible, and the performance of 7nm chips can be increased by 40%.
TSMC has now been able to use 3D packaging technology to manufacture 4nm process chips and 3nm process chips, but the yield rate is not high, and mass production cannot be achieved at present.
Apple has implemented the "glue method", which simply and rudely splices two M1 Max chips side by side to obtain the M1 Ultra chip.
At present, many semiconductor giants are also vigorously developing new chip packaging technologies, such as Intel, AMD and other international companies. The "small chip" technology we often hear about this technology is this technology.
conclusion
From these points of view, Huawei's chip stacking technology solution is feasible.
In addition, the development of its own technology will also greatly reduce the dependence of chip production on lithography machines. As we all know, the more high-precision chips are dependent on high-end lithography machines. TSMC was unable to ship freely to Huawei, in large part because of the lithography machine manufacturing technology used, some of which came from Laomei.
In any case, the initiative is the safest to be in your own hands. After this chip was "stuck in the neck" encounter, Huawei certainly does not want to experience it again, and Huawei's affairs have also sounded the alarm bell for Chinese companies. Now many enterprises are also vigorously developing their own technologies to jointly build an independent ecology of the domestic semiconductor industry.
With the joint efforts of many enterprises and the support of the state, I believe that that day will soon come.
For Huawei's chip problem, we welcome everyone to exchange their views together.