Huawei to restart 5G mobile chip production this year: Report

Huawei is up and ready to restart printing its 5G mobile chip design into mass production with the help of domestic partners, says a report from NikkeiAsia based on people related to this matter.

To achieve this aim, Huawei is working with China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC). The partnership aims to produce a 5G mobile chipset in the coming months.

For those who don’t know, Huawei stopped printing its Kirin mobile processors after a wide US ban in 2020. Later on, the US also blacklisted SMIC. So, these two companies are now in a big chase for semiconductor manufacturing but the latest information is something that the Chinese industry has been waiting for.

The source revealed that Huawei will use 7-nanometer process technology. It is the most advanced chip node manufacturing node that the company could get from SMIC at the moment.

Up until 2020, Huawei used to be one of the biggest customers of Taiwan’s TSMC, which is now producing 3nm and 4nm chips for companies such as Apple.

Even after the ban, Huawei kept on researching new chip designs via its subsidiary – HiSilicon. Furthermore, the company didn’t even cut chip designing engineers.

Back in April, Huawei announced its own EDA tools to pace up semiconductor development. That’s not it, Huawei shared these technologies with industry partners.

In the current scenario, Huawei may still need Qualcomm Snapdragon to fill in requirements until the chip technology node matures. As for now, Qualcomm is allowed to sell only 4G chips to the Chinese tech maker.

An analyst said that production yield could be low in the start and there’s a lot of room for improvements. But Huawei is likely to invest a big chunk of R&D money to achieve good output.

The report also mentioned that the new 7nm Huawei 5G mobile chip may hit stores by 2024. Aside from this, Huawei already has matured the 12-14nm process and we may see that semiconductor on the shelf the end of this year.

(source)