The results of domestic mobile phone self-developed chips have first appeared

It has been 3 years since the chip industry chain started a high-tech war in 2020.

In just 3 years, our chip self-sufficiency rate has increased significantly. From less than 5% before, it is now more than 20%. To avoid sanctions, China's high-tech products are stripping U.S.-sourced technology.

Domestic mobile phone manufacturers have also set off a wave of self-developed chips, and have achieved initial results.

Recently, research institute Techanarei released the disassembly analysis results of China's latest smartphones Xiaomi 12T Pro and vivo X90 Pro/Pro+, and found that the proportion of China's self-developed chips is increasing year by year.

01

Xiaomi, vivo mobile phone disassembly

Xiaomi Mi 12T Pro

In October 2022, the Xiaomi Mi 12T Pro was released. Like the 12S series, it is equipped with the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset and uses TSMC's 4nm process.

The picture shows the motherboard of the Xiaomi Mi 12T Pro. The circuit board is divided by function, and each function has a metal shielding cover, and the shielding layer is used as a countermeasure for electromagnetic waves and heat dissipation. When the shield is removed, it can be seen that the chip is filled with chips on the back of one substrate. On the left is the processor side, and on the right is the power system that supports the processor from the back. The main processor is implemented in the form of POP (Packet-to-Packet) with DRAM above and processor below. The processor is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+Gen 1. The DRAM is located directly above and the transceivers for memory and communications are located next to it.

The biggest feature of Xiaomi 12T Pro is the use of Xiaomi's self-developed surging P1 chip. Xiaomi not only developed and adopted battery charging ICs, camera AI processors, etc., but also continued to use its own chips, greatly shortening the fast charging time.

vivo X90 Pro/Pro+

The agency also disassembled the X90 Pro released by vivo in December 2022 and accidentally discovered that the internal structure of the phone is almost identical to that of the Xiaomi Mi 12T Pro. The difference is that the vivo X90 Pro has two batteries. Looking at the circuit board of the vivo X90 Pro, the substrate is a 2-layer structure separated by spacers, attached to the back of the substrate. In addition to separating functions by dividing the floor, it shields electromagnetic waves and heat like Xiaomi models.

It is worth noting that the X90 Pro is also equipped with vivo's own processor "V2" on the secondary board on the second floor. V2 is vivo's second-generation self-developed chip. It is a very high-performance processor with AI capabilities and camera ISP capabilities. vivo V2 is manufactured using TSMC's 6nm process and has high computing performance of 18TOPS. The open-hole analysis of vivo V1 and V2 chips shows that the development and commercialization of the two chips mark the beginning of vivo semiconductors.

In addition, from Techinsights' many disassembly of Huawei mobile phones, it can be found that in addition to the Kirin chip of the core SoC, Huawei's various fine chips - RF chips, logic control chips, power management chips, and WiFi chips have been replaced with HiSilicon self-developed chips.

It can be seen that the self-developed chips of domestic mobile phone manufacturers are accelerating into the products.

02

Self-developed chips have achieved results　

Since 2021, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have ushered in a wave of self-developed chip boom.

In September 2021, vivo launched its self-developed independent ISP chip V1 as a supplement to the general-purpose processor that is difficult to meet the needs of users for personalized or heavy shooting. At present, vivo has released two self-developed chips.

In March 2021, Xiaomi launched the ISP Surging C1, followed by the fast-charging chip The Paper P1 and the battery management chip The Paper G1, and P1 and G1 formed the Xiaomi Surging Battery Management System, realizing the linkage between self-developed chips.

OPPO's chip self-research also starts from image-specific chips. MariSilicon X, the first self-developed chip released in December 2021, is an image NPU that provides computing power algorithm support for OPPO's pursuit of "natural, comfortable, and memory-conforming" mobile phone image concepts based on AI algorithms, AI noise reduction, and real-time RAW computing. MariSilicon Y, released in December 2022, is a Bluetooth audio SoC chip that better meets the transmission requirements of high-resolution streaming media through higher transmission rate and higher lossless compression rate encoding and decoding technology for lossless sound quality.

However, among Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, only the surging S1 belongs to an SoC chip, but because this chip has many defects and average performance, there is no follow-up in the end. OPPO and vivo are relatively close to the route of chip research and development, starting with ISP chips and then transitioning to SoC chips.

03

Why ISP chips, not SoCs?

On the one hand, SoCs are called system-on-chips, which are generally composed of CPU, GPU, NPU and storage, integrating many different functions: for example, the CPU is responsible for processing computing tasks; The GPU is responsible for image rendering; Baseband is responsible for communication; ISPs are responsible for processing camera data; The DSP is responsible for decoding; NPU is acting on artificial intelligence computing. Therefore, the scale of SoC chips is generally much larger than ordinary ASICs, coupled with the design difficulties caused by deep submicron processes, etc., which greatly increases the complexity of SoC design, and both the process and tape-out costs are very high.

Among the current mobile phone manufacturers, only Apple, Google, Huawei, and Samsung have the strength to design SoC chips. At the level of supply chain manufacturers, there are Qualcomm, MediaTek and UNISOC.

On the other hand, the technical difficulty of ISP chips is relatively low, the investment is relatively small, the trial and error space is relatively large, and due to the limitation of the upgrade law of the SoC chip, the ISP module update frequency will not be very high, and the specific upgrade law cannot be mastered, etc., and the controllability of mobile phone manufacturers over ISP is very low. Mobile phone manufacturers can effectively solve the problems mentioned above by developing their own ISP chips. The self-designed ISP chip can be customized more specifically according to the specific needs of mobile phone products, giving full play to the strength of the mobile phone imaging system, and it is easier to achieve a breakthrough in the imaging system. And do not worry about the difference in ISP modules between different SoC platforms, it is also easy to ensure the image quality by changing the SoC platform, so self-developed ISP chips are crucial.

It is reported that Shanghai Zheku, OPPO's IC design subsidiary, has launched the research and development plan of application processor (AP) and mobile phone system-on-chip (SoC), of which AP chip is expected to be launched in 2023 and uses TSMC's 6nm process. In 2024, a mobile SoC integrating AP and baseband (Modem) will be launched, and TSMC's 4nm process will be further adopted. It is worth noting that recently, according to the news of the network digital blogger "mobile phone chip master", it was revealed that OPPO's self-developed smartphone application processor (AP) has officially tape-out, and will use TSMC's 4nm process to be plugged in MediaTek's 5G baseband chip, which is expected to be mass-produced at the end of 2023 and listed in 2024.

Zuo Kunlong, ISP chip architect of the mobile phone department of Xiaomi Group, also said that he will start from the surging C1 and start again and return to the design and manufacture of mobile phone SoC chips.

04

What is the difficulty of self-developed SoC?

As we all know, only Huawei HiSilicon has the ability to develop SoC chips in China, and other mobile phone manufacturers choose self-developed special chips for specific functions, so how difficult is it to develop a self-developed SoC?

In terms of research and development difficulty, the complexity of SoC chips is very high, and core components such as baseband, ISP chiplets, and AI need to be solved at the same time, and it is also necessary to cultivate the layout in CPUs, GPUs and other processors. As we all know, Apple's processor still uses external baseband, Qualcomm, as the exclusive supplier of Apple's 5G baseband chip, holds the vast majority of baseband patents and charges Apple a high licensing fee every year. Domestic mobile phone manufacturers want to develop their own SoC chips, and baseband is the first big mark.

On the issue of time cost, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple basically iterate a chip processor a year, and develop synchronously with the advancement of chip technology. If you make an SoC from scratch, you have to keep up with the mainstream market level, which is extremely difficult. Maybe it will take many years to dedicate yourself to making SoCs now, and when they are successful and mass-produced and launched.

On the ecological issue, mobile phone manufacturers should develop their own mobile phone SoC, in addition to sufficient technical strength in the chip field, but also require that the amount of their own products is large enough to support the ecology of self-developed chips. At present, only large manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, and Huawei in the world have such technical strength and product ecology.

Apple and Huawei can achieve high-end thanks to self-developed SoCs to achieve deep software and hardware integration, which greatly improves user experience. For example, Apple's A15 chip after many years of iteration is far better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 in terms of performance and power consumption, and the M1 series chip launched by Apple has also helped break the ecological barrier between mobile phones and PCs. Huawei also benefits from its powerful Kirin chip, gaining greater growth space and stronger industrial chain voice in the mobile phone market.

Whether in the domestic market or on a global scale. In the past 10 years, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have continued to take the path of globalization. At present, high-end has become an inevitable path. At present, mobile phone manufacturers hinder their own technical capabilities and investment, so that self-developed chips can only start from power chips, image chips, and then develop the main SoC chip after all aspects are mature. In the future, we will definitely see more self-developed and even self-made domestic chips appear in domestic mobile phones.

In addition to the self-developed chips of mobile phone companies, the industrial chain is also strengthening technology research and development and making breakthroughs, domestic CMOS chips, memory chips, 5G RF chips, etc. have been successfully mass-produced, and the joint efforts of the industrial chain and domestic mobile phone companies are gradually forming a complete industrial chain of domestic chips.