so now that we established that BAW filter is important. How many can they support? Well, doesn't work like I thought.
Looks like a 5G phone would need over 70 filters (BAW or SAW types) for different bands that it needs to be able to accept for 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, blue tooth, different wifi bands, GPS & other GNSS. This is vs maybe half that for 4G phones. So just BAW filter alone, you might need 30 of them for the higher bands that BAW filters are more optimized for. Here is a chart of which band to use BAW vs TC-SAW vs conventional SAW. Basically, BAW makes sense from 1.5GHz to 6GHz
Just as I estimated. Each 5G phone require $12 of filters
For SAW filter. Each 4-inch wafer has 5000 SAW filter. Each wafer is 300RMB. China's SAW market is 15.5B SAW worth about 930M RMB in 2019
In 2019, there were probably 600 million mobile phones sold by Chinese phone makers? Each phone needed about 25-30 SAW filter?
Looks like in the past Huawei have already invested in firms producing SAW filters. Including one that produces 50million a quarter
But still major ground to make up
the inadequacy of domestic production can be seen here
Just 660m produced in 2019 when the need was 15.5B
But what about BAW
if they get to 2k 8-inch wpm, how many can they produce.
Well according to this Akoustis page
So 150k 6-inch wafer produces 5B BAW filters, which works out to 33.333k filters/6-inch wafer. Using 8-inch wafer having 80% surface area than 6-inch, this works out to 60k filters/8-inch wafer.
2k 8-inch wafers -> 120million filters. If each 5G phone requires 30 BAW -> 4 million phones, if 40 BAW -> 3 million phones. I still need to research here.
