How Huawei will overcome the US chip ban
The ban on Huawei that was imposed by the United States after it was determined by the administration of Donald Trump that the Chinese corporation constituted a threat to the country’s national security has become the great soap opera of our century.
Now, the Asian corporation is making preparations to avoid being blocked in this way.
In the year 2020, the United States amended a regulation governing exports in order to prohibit foundries that manufactured chips utilising American technology from sending cutting-edge semiconductors to Huawei, who at the time was the most successful smartphone maker in the world.
Apple was TSMC’s top customer at the time, but Huawei was the foundry’s second largest customer overall, making Huawei the world’s second largest customer overall.
This, together with the limitations that the United States placed on Huawei the year before, contributed to make life tough for the Chinese company that is regarded as a security danger in the United States.
Huawei has, from the beginning, made efforts to gain an advantage. For instance, he did not include Android because he wanted to concentrate on the company’s own operating system, which is now working on the HarmonyOS 3.0 version.
In addition, it has been successful in acquiring 4nm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 CPUs for its mobile devices, but with modifications that prevent their usage with 5G networks.
In other words, they have the most powerful SoC available right now, despite the fact that it is unable to connect to 5G networks.
Plans for Huawei to make a comeback in the smartphone manufacturing industry
In conclusion. Huawei has not given up and has no plans to do so in the foreseeable future. According to Bloomberg, Huawei is providing financial support to a start-up chipmaker located in Shenzhen.
This chipmaker has the ability to place orders for chipmaking equipment even to nations outside of China. Huawei’s ultimate goal is to create a plant that produces semiconductors.
According to public archives and satellite pictures, the business Pengxinwei IC Manufacturing Co., which is now being managed by an executive who once worked for Huawei, plans to construct a facility in the vicinity of Huawei’s headquarters. This information comes from subject-matter experts.
They indicate that Huawei has intentions to purchase anything from fifty percent to one hundred percent of the foundry’s production.
The semiconductor manufacturing equipment that was ordered by the corporation, which is known as PXW, is expected to arrive sometime during the first part of the year following the current one.
The EUV lithography machine is an essential piece of equipment that PXW may have problems acquiring for whatever reason. (Extreme Ultraviolet). These machines are roughly the size of a bus and are used to etch incredibly thin circuits.
They are manufactured and sold by the Dutch firm ASML, which is the only business in the world to do so.
Imagine how tiny these designs must be given that the most powerful semiconductors include billions of transistors (for instance, the A16 Bionic from Manzana has approximately 16 billion transistors within it), and you’ll have some idea of how thin these ideas are.
The Dutch government will not provide permission for a Chinese business to purchase one of these mammoth EUV lithography equipment, which cost in excess of $200 million each. Despite the significance of these machines for the creation of cutting-edge semiconductors.
SMIC, the largest foundry in China, claims that it has been able to make basic 7nm circuits without possessing an EUV lithography equipment. In comparison, TSMC and Samsung Foundry are mass-producing 3nm chips.
However, moving below 7nm will be impossible to achieve without an EUV lithography machine.
Although the Bloomberg story claims that It’s unclear if the semiconductor startup’s intentions would breach any of the US trade penalties against Huawei.
The corporation will have a difficult time locating all of the necessary equipment to produce chips for the next generation.
As is the case with Apple, Huawei designs its own chips, but because the company lacks manufacturing capabilities of its own, it contracts foundries to manufacture its Kirin processors.
Therefore, we will have to wait and observe how they do in the medium run. The ideas made by Huawei for the smartphone industry are missed.
news source: phonearena
