It seems like Huawei is planning to boost its in-house chip design capabilities. This information comes from Digitimes, and was provided by ‘industry sources’.
Huawei wants to boost in-house chip design capabilities to reduce dependency on others
The company is trying to further reduce its dependence on US technology by doing this. As most of you know, Huawei has been predominantly using its Kirin processors in its smartphones.
Those chips are manufactured by Huawei’s chipmaking arm called ‘HiSilicon’, and the two companies have been beefing up their R&D teams, according to industry sources.
The sources have also added that Huawei plans to work towards self-reliance in the production of core technologies. This points towards less dependency on US technology, that’s for sure.
The company is trying to be more self-sufficient. Not only when it comes to the tech itself, but manufacturing as well. This change could affect Huawei’s existing Taiwan-based partners, as they will feel pressure to maintain orders from Huawei this year.
The sources noted that Taiwan-based suppliers of peripheral ICs, such as display driver ICs, sensors, RFICs, and analog chips, should not have any issues. They should still be able to land orders from Huawei without a problem.
The company plans to announce in-house developed wired & wireless connectivity ICs
The source also claims that Huawei is planning to announce an in-house developed wired and wireless connectivity ICs in Q2 2020. It was also noted that Huawei developed its own processors, including AI chips, thanks to its R&D team. The company’s workforce has been scaled up immensely over the last 10 years.
As most of you know by now, Huawei ended up on the US ban list last year. The company has been accused of many things, and thus is forbidden to work with US companies, with several exceptions for existing products.
That being said, Huawei not only lost Google’s partnership as a result, at least for the time being, but a lot of partners for its hardware. That includes some core technologies as well. The company managed to sort things out fairly quickly in the hardware department. Things are more tricky when it comes to software, though.
In any case, the company has developed HMS to replace GMS, and is also promoting AppGallery as a Play Store replacement.
That software issue is an ongoing battle. While that is ongoing, Huawei is trying to boost its in-house chip design capabilities to avoid such issues again. The company simply wants to be more independent.
It’s not difficult to understand this move by Huawei. It doesn’t want to allow others to dictate its business, as one such decision from the US managed to create a lot of problems for Huawei. It remains to be seen what will happen from this point on.