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Huawei 5G base station teardown reveals only 1% U.S. components
Huawei is the largest network equipment maker. After the U.S. ban, the company has reduced reliance on related components. Adding to this, a recent teardown reveals that there is only 1% of U.S. components are now under work in the latest Huawei 5G base station.
A teardown coming from China reveals that 5G Huawei small base stations (5G small cell, covering areas ranging from tens of meters to 1 kilometer) use the lowest proportion of American components at 1%.
A detailed report on this matter has a further description of the components. More than half of the overall components used in the 5G Huawei base station are made in China. This is 7% more than Huawei’s large 5G base stations.
Looking back to 2020, a 5G teardown showed an estimated cost of 1320 USD, of which, the Chinese component accounted for 48.2 percent and 27 percent U.S. components.
Key components of Huawei base stations include the main semiconductor made by HiSilicon at 42 USD, memory made by Samsung Electronics at 3.20 USD, Storage device made by Cypress Semiconductor (U.S.) and Winbond Electronics (Taiwan), Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) made by Lattice Semiconductor and Xilinx (US), Semiconductor for power control made by Texas Instrument and ON Semiconductor, and Circuit protection parts are made by TDK (Japan).
The chipset used in the small 5G base station is printed by Taiwan’s TSMC before the U.S. ban and is part of the chip inventory saved by the Chiense tech giant. It is due to the fact that 5G base station shipments are smaller than the millions of shipments of smartphones.
Furthermore, Huawei’s 5G small base stations are using analog chips with Huawei’s LOGO. So these could be the company’s self-developed chipset but the manufacturer is still unknown.
Interestingly, analog chips require low-process technology as compared to logic chips.
Research firm Omdia reveals that the shipment of 5G small base stations is estimated to reach 2.8 million units in 2024, which is 3.5 times higher than in 2020. It is noted that the small cell market, the Asia-Pacific market accounts for more than 50% of the total, and China is the largest market among them.
