Regret, can only say regret.
According to the 2021 global semiconductor research report released by Gartner, due to the US trade sanctions, affecting China's overall share of the global chip market, Huawei HiSilicon has fallen out of the ranking of the world's top 25 semiconductor suppliers.
The top 10 on the current ranking are Samsung Electronics, Intel, SK Hynix, Micron Technology, Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, NVIDIA, and AMD.
"HiSilicon's revenue fell by 81 percent, from $8.2 billion in 2020 to $1.5 billion in 2021, a significant decrease of $6.7 billion in revenue, a direct result of U.S. sanctions against the company and its parent company Huawei," the report said. ”
According to Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner, China's market share fell from 6.7% in 2020 to 6.5% last year due to the sharp decline in HiSilicon's share of sanctions, which had a significant negative impact on China's performance in the global semiconductor market.
So some people on the Internet say that Huawei should sell HiSilicon so that HiSilicon can bypass sanctions. This method sounds very big picture, but think about it carefully, there are some cerebral thrombosis, after all, people on the other side of the ocean are not stupid. Judging from Huawei's recent actions, Huawei not only did not give up HiSilicon, but also continued to increase the accumulation in the field of chips, and now HiSilicon has been upgraded to Huawei's first-level department.
In addition, Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, said that HiSilicon is a chip design department in Huawei, not a profitable company, and there is no demand for profitability for it. Now it's time to keep this team and keep going, as long as we can afford it. This team can continue to research, develop and prepare for the future.
Of course, that being said, the chip problem always has to be solved.
In March this year, Apple used the "glue process" to form two M1 Max into a more powerful M1 Ultra, Intel, AMD, huawei have used similar technology to make chips, such as Huawei's server chip Kunpeng 920 is the product of this logic.
This technology falls within the scope of Chiplet technology, which splits the chips such as processing units and storage, and then 3D packages these chips into a chip through advanced packaging technology. This can increase the chip core, save space, and if used well, it can also reduce costs.
But Huawei's current chips are limited, especially in the manufacturing process. Even if SMIC can OEM, it can currently achieve up to 10nm process effect.
At this time, it is interesting to come, since Chiplet is a stack of chip modules, can it improve the performance of the chip through multi-chip stacking under the premise that the process is not dominant, so as to achieve an effect close to 7nm.
This method can be done, but there are many things that still need to be addressed.
The first is the advanced packaging process, the best solution of this process is still in the hands of TSMC, Huawei is limited at the moment can not find it OEM, even Samsung can not, because there is American technology, and Samsung itself is still interested in this process is a problem.
Secondly, the chip created by this idea, the core of the two chips is packaged into a chip, not to mention whether the performance can be doubled, this heat and power consumption is definitely super doubled, not to mention the water cooling may not be able to hold, not to mention the small body of the mobile phone.
Finally, there is the cost, and the price is certainly not low. The most Huawei can use is SMIC's N+1 solution, stacked with a 10nm process, but this cost... Compared with the current 5nm, 7nm process has no price advantage.
Therefore, Huawei's current direction is to do server chips first and consolidate core business, as for mobile phone chips, that is, Kirin may have to wait.