Chinese semiconductor thread II
- Thread starter vincent
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To put into perspective, +24500% growth is equivalent to the entire China GDP growth between 1991 to 2016, and #9 to #2 economy ranking in under 2 decades. HiSilicon achieved that in a single year. This means HiSilicon is beating US sanctions.
"BUT HiSilicon is smaller than Qualcomm! Ergo, sanctions working as intended" says My Gina et al.
Anybody know why we haven't seen much of a effort to build up alternative suppliers to Qualcomm and Mediatek CPUs? Oppo's chip unit failed and UNISOC is still making low end crap
If sanctions hit Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo they're still totally screwed. Even more screwed than Huawei was. I'd think they'd be at least working together on some chip project
Or are they just completely relying on Hilisilicon as their backup and praying they don't get sanctioned?
If sanctions hit Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo they're still totally screwed. Even more screwed than Huawei was. I'd think they'd be at least working together on some chip project
Or are they just completely relying on Hilisilicon as their backup and praying they don't get sanctioned?
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UNISOC has companies like Transsion as its main customers. They sell smartphones to African countries. My guess is they simply don't have any demand for higher end SoC. Would be outside of their main customer base's budget. It is probably a chicken-egg issue.
Xiaomi has designed its own low end SoCs in the past. Oppo used to have a semiconductor design team but they disbanded it not that long ago. I don't remember it ever releasing any hardware.
Xiaomi has designed its own low end SoCs in the past. Oppo used to have a semiconductor design team but they disbanded it not that long ago. I don't remember it ever releasing any hardware.
Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo is what makes Qualcomm survive (+ Chinese automakers for cockpit chip).
If US sanctions Chinese smartphones, Qualcomm will go bankrupt.
Of course US can do literally anything, but this would be the dumbest sanction ever.
....and even in this extreme case, Xiaomi can survive without smartphones (they make cars now and also a lot of consumer electronic stuff), the other 2 can switch to Mediatek, so US would need to ban Mediatek too...so also Mediatek would go bankrupt.
UNISOC spends a lot in R&D, they have , but maybe they prefer not to overexpose themself.
Following is just my speculation, not facts: UNISOC uses TSMC for foundry services, so they have to be very cautious not to step on Qualcomm's toes. OTH also US is probably aware that banning UNISOC would backfire on Qualcomm....so we have a kind of tight rope balance: UNISOC can live as long as they remain in a niche / low-digit market share.
IMHO when SMIC will have enough capacity at advanced nodes, the chicken will come to roast.
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you are probably right on Unisoc.
at some point, huawei will probably move into the lower end chip design space and have them fabb'd at SMIC
A 12nm HW designed chip is probably good enough to compete with a low end SoC that Unisoc designs
As for Xiaomi, they are designing their own SoC at the moment. Word is their chips use N5 and is similar in performance to K9000S. So probably enough for Redmi models. We will see.
Vivo/Oppo (same parent corp) and Xiaomi are basically legacy companies using a legacy arrangement from the pre-tech war days.
They will continue to use this arrangement until the other shoe drops from the US which will serious injure them unless they have domestic suppliers, gut Qualcomm and cripple Mediatek as well.
Alternative supplier is SMIC and hopefully Hua Hong and Nexchip when Chinese equipment matures to the level that can support flagship phones -- which doesn't necessarily mean sub-5nm with the advent of integration (demonstrated by Huawei on the M60 and P70 on 7nm) and with packaging advancing coming in the near future.
You can't separate Qualcomm (using TSMC)/Mediatek as some special segment. Replacing them is part of the same effort to gain independence after the bans on Huawei and China's fabs.
Xiaomi is continuing with its own chip designer unit. Vivo/Oppo gave up to concentrate on current margins so they can have an warchest for the eventuality. Perhaps, by then the local industry has matured and they contract locally for design and fab.
There is little doubt they both know what is coming down the pike. It is just different approach in strategy.