Chinese chipmaker begins 5G RF chip production, will solve Huawei problem?

Huawei cannot launch 5G phones due to the lack of a 5G RF chip to bind with SoCs. However, there’s a report that Chinese chipset makers have found a solution to produce commercial 5G RF chipsets.

DigiTimes reported that Chinese IC design houses are entering commercial production of 5G RF filters, power amplifiers (PA), and related modules, marking a step forward in boosting the self-sufficiency for such chips in China facing continuous semiconductor trade sanctions. The meaning of commercial production could be taken as the product is ready to launch for customers. However, there’s more to know on this matter.

What is RF Chip:

RF and wireless chips are integrated circuits (IC) that are designed specifically for radio frequency (RF), microwave, and other wireless communications or data transmission applications. Receivers are RF and wireless chips that are designed to receive signals or data from antennas or from other system devices.

Sanctions:

The RF Chip market is major dominated by U.S. and Japanese companies and most of the market share has banned Huawei from accessing such technology after the 2019 Entity List. After that, Huawei has been forced to stock up 5G chipsets such as Kirin 9000 but the company ran out of inventory and started launching 4G phones.

On the other hand, the U.S. is also implementing new chipset restrictions on China and the latest development will help the country to help domestic companies with this required tech component to make new products. In our view, Huawei could be one of the biggest customers and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the 5G RF chip, if they come out as commercial.