Huawei, like any major companies, has plan A,B,C etc to battle out the 5G base station game.. (smartphone is important,too but secondary because Trump really wanted to kill Huawei 5G biz, right?)
In case if "all" semiconductor lines fail to work in year 2021 (and even 2022,too!), one option is to use a (older) 'Nokia' option as mentioned in WSJ below?
The only negative points are: more expensive and more power intensive, but the extra costs can be worked out with wireless operators by negotiating less service fees for the coming years etc.. anyway, it only covers for perhaps 1+ year, because you can bet by 2023 China will be successful in their 7nm nodes.
The 'Nokia' option would then convert Huawei SoC for 5G into FPGAs.
here is the background story:
"Nokia selected the type of chip it thought would work best before an important technical debate had been settled, Mr. Uitto said. A telecom-industry consortium that included Nokia hadn’t finalized the standards for how cellular antennas should communicate with phones and other devices.
Nokia had two options. One is called a “system-on-chip,” or SoC. Advantage: It is power efficient and cheap to make. Disadvantage: Once the chip is made, it is difficult to reprogram. If Nokia ordered a supply of SoC chips and then 5G standards didn’t support them, the company would have a bunch of useless chips.
The other option was the so-called field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, chip. Its advantage was flexibility. An FPGA can be reprogrammed after it goes into an antenna. Nokia could start making antennas with the chips, and wireless carriers could reprogram them to suit whatever 5G standards would be adopted later.
Nokia focused on the more expensive FPGA. When the development of 5G accelerated, and standards crystallized sooner than expected, around 2018, Nokia realized it had too many FPGA chips and not enough of the cheaper ones that Huawei and Ericsson had bet on.
The FPGA was like “buying a car with a lot of features that you don’t use,” said Sandro Tavares, Nokia’s head of mobile marketing. The SoC, meanwhile, “has exactly what you need, so you’re not spending that much money there.”
One European telecom executive said the price tag for certain Nokia equipment was double that of products by Huawei and Ericsson using the SoC chips. Nokia executives say the price difference for high-volume products was typically between 5% to 15%. Nokia products using the FPGA chip also used more energy, a downside for wireless carriers trying to cut down power consumption.
Earlier this year, Nokia released SoC-based products comparable to Huawei’s and Ericsson’s. Mr. Uitto said 35% of Nokia’s shipments this year will have SoC chips, a number that will be 100% by 2022.
