Huawei is a well-known manufacturer of communication equipment in China, but also once the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer, Huawei's rapid rise in the mobile phone industry has also brought a large number of orders to TSMC. As we all know, limited by chip rules, the lithography machine purchased by the mainland from ASML has not arrived, and the domestic chip technology has therefore been in a backward stage, and high-end chip production can only rely on TSMC and Samsung for OEM.
Huawei has its own chip design capabilities, its design of hiSilicon kirin chips has been in the world's advanced level, in terms of performance has not lost Apple's A processor and Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, so the need for cutting-edge chip production technology, currently able to master this technology and mass production of foundries of the enterprise only TSMC, TSMC has thus become Huawei's only chip foundry enterprises, will bring more than 30 billion yuan of revenue to TSMC every year.
The good times did not last long, huawei's close relationship with TSMC was finally broken by a paper document, TSMC was banned from free shipment, no one expected such a situation. We all know that TSMC is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer, and has successfully mass-produced 7nm, 5nm process chips, and even continues to break through the 3nm process to make the chip performance further.
But we don't know that TSMC's large number of technical patents and production processes are almost all in the hands of US companies, so after modifying the rules for free shipment of chips, TSMC can only choose to stop shipping to Huawei, which is also a helpless choice.
After losing Huawei, it means that TSMC has lost a large number of orders, which has brought great impact to future development. TSMC's chip production technology is at the world's advanced level, the cost of chips is also very expensive, and the chip requirements for ordinary digital products are not high, so TSMC finally decided to build a factory in the United States to seek more development.
TSMC can not freely ship the problem in fact, Huawei has long expected, after losing the order of TSMC, Huawei will screen driver chips, automotive chips and TV chips and other production processes do not require high-precision technology chips to the domestic chip production company OEM, at the same time Huawei also announced a full entry into the chip semiconductor industry, through its Hubble Investment Company to form a chip industry chain, relying on its own influence and advanced production technology, began to develop to the chip semiconductor industry.
Since 2018, Huawei has begun the layout of related industries, and in 2020, it has spent 1 billion pounds to establish a photoelectronic research and manufacturing base in Cambridge, England, which is what Ren Zhengfei said about optoelectronic chips, and once this plan is successful, it will be able to completely bypass TSMC and U.S. technology and achieve independent production of chips.
Huawei also applied for a patent on chip stacking packaging structure and its packaging method and electronic equipment in 2019. Through this patented technology, it is possible to realize the stacking packaging of multiple sub-chips on the basis of the same main chip, which significantly improves the performance of the chip.
From the perspective of the current chip development direction, the development of chips to size reduction has encountered bottlenecks, especially after entering the 5nm process, the improvement of chip performance has been stretched. Product performance improvement is slow, users are naturally reluctant to buy it, so Apple took the lead in breaking the traditional chip development concept, and achieved a substantial improvement in performance through stacking technology.
Apple used TSMC's CoWoS-S packaging technology to interconnect two M1 Max chip dies and launched an Unprecedented Performance SoC chip, named M1 UItra. With 114 billion transistors, 20 core CPUs, and a maximum support of 128GB of memory, the M1 UItra theoretically doubles the performance of the M1 Max.
Chip to size shrinkage development has encountered a bottleneck, through the packaging stacking technology to achieve the development of chips to stronger performance is a good way, by the two 10nm process of chip grain stacking performance can reach the level of 5nm process, which is good news for technology companies.
In fact, Huawei has mastered the chip stacking packaging technology as early as 2019, but in the direction of chip shrinkage, Huawei's technology has been unpopular. Nowadays, the chip has encountered a bottleneck in the development of size reduction, and chip stacking technology has become a new development direction.
Once package stacking technology becomes the direction of future chip development, Huawei will likely bypass TSMC and choose to establish cooperation with SMIC. SMIC has been able to mass-produce 14nm process chips, its N+1 and N+2 processes in terms of performance and power consumption has basically reached the level of 7nm, although there is still a certain gap, but for ordinary users there is no obvious difference.
Huawei can use its own package stacking technology to package two 14nm chip dies into chips with performance comparable to 7nm, and with this new technology, Huawei breaks the monopoly of TSMC.
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As the saying goes, technology knows no borders. Lao Mei's decision made this sentence a laughing stock. Although this incident did not make Huawei's development smooth, it also made domestic technology companies realize their shortcomings, aroused the momentum of continuous innovation and development of domestic technology companies, and the consequences of supply cuts also caused TSMC to suffer huge economic losses.
What do you think about Huawei's new technology? Do you think it is possible to bypass TSMC and realize domestic chip autonomy?