Huawei finalized the list of suppliers meant to produce components for its first 5G Android smartphone, including a new cooling solution, DigiTimes reports, citing mobile industry sources. The Shenzhen, Guangdong-based company is hence understood to have already decided on the overall design of the upcoming handset and may begin receiving the parts it ordered before the end of the year. The device itself is still on course to launch in mid-2019, most likely June, as per the same report.
Taiwanese Auras Technology is said to have been picked as the sole supplier of cooling components meant to be implemented into the unannounced Android smartphone and is reportedly planning to start the fulfillment process — i.e. flow production —in September. As the company’s first 5G smartphone is expected to be delivered in the traditional candy bar form factor, mass-manufacturing its components shouldn’t provide any significant technical challenges like something such as sourcing parts for a foldable handset would. Auras is hence said to be making traditional heat dissipation sheets made of copper that are set to be incorporated into Huawei’s smartphone. The Taiwanese company reportedly already started trial production last week but didn’t comment on the latest rumor in any capacity.
The sheets in question are said to be 0.4mm thin and will be an evolution of a cooling mechanism design Auras first commercialized in 2016. Auras Chairman Ys Lin previously said head dissipation solutions will have to become more efficient in order to account for the 5G era as higher wireless speeds may also lead to certain mobile hardware running hotter than it does on 4G LTE networks, as suggested by the fact they’ll consumer approximately 2.5 times more power than the previous generation of the technology. While copper cooling sheets are not an entirely new solution, they still haven’t been widely used in the smartphone segment and have so far mostly been implemented into flagship notebooks. It’s presently unclear whether Huawei will end up being the manufacturer that releases the first 5G-enabled smartphone but whoever ends up doing so is also likely to pioneer copper sheet cooling in the mobile field which is still mostly reliant on less efficient graphite sheets.