Friends who care about Huawei should know that since TSMC cut off its supply to Huawei, Huawei has smashed 65.438+0.2 billion chip orders to MediaTek. With the escalation of the US ban in mid-August, the chips produced by MediaTek for Huawei could not be shipped normally, and the produced chips were stranded in the warehouse. Because there is no price advantage when MediaTek and Qualcomm compete, MediaTek's chips must be treated at a lower price if they want to be sold to other domestic brands.
Qualcomm is now the main supplier of 5G chips of most domestic brands such as Xiaomi, vivo and OPPO, and more than 70% of orders in MediaTek come from this Huawei order. Therefore, it is estimated that this year's shipments from MediaTek cannot offset the huge losses of Huawei's orders.
According to Guo Ming's speculation, there are only two outcomes after Huawei's ban takes effect. One is that no supplier can provide Huawei with system chips; Second, only Qualcomm can provide Huawei with system chips. This means that the ultimate goal of the United States to sanction Huawei by adding it to the entity list is actually to make Huawei completely abandon the HiSilicon Kirin series chips independently developed and use chips made in Qualcomm like other domestic mobile phone brands. If the plan of the United States is really like this, it will inevitably bring huge orders to Qualcomm. Of course, Huawei, which lost its self-developed chip, may not be so personalized in mobile phone performance, and may also cause unstable sales in the short term, but in the long run, it will be beneficial to Huawei's future development.
At the end of July, 20, Qualcomm reached a long-term cooperation agreement with Huawei, authorizing Huawei to use its patented technology. It is reported that Intel's financial statements in August show that it is still supplying Huawei, including consumer processors and server processor chips. In August, 2020, at the launch conference of Huawei MateBook series, all computers in this series were equipped with Intel's i3, i5 and i7 processor chips, which is also a symbol.
It is reported that Qualcomm is still lobbying the US Department of Commerce to lift the restrictions on the company's chip sales to Huawei. If Huawei Kirin is out of print and Qualcomm supplies chips to Huawei, according to Huawei's annual smartphone shipments, it can be roughly estimated that Qualcomm will get about $8 billion in orders each year. However, if Huawei is not supplied by Qualcomm, can it survive?
Recently, China has also taken action. The president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that we would turn the bottleneck list of the United States into a list of future scientific research tasks for layout. Therefore, in the next at least 3-5 years, domestic brands of low-priced mobile phones will begin to use domestic system chips one after another, which will greatly stimulate the development of the industry according to market demand. Of course, it also includes mask aligner's research and development work in the field of chip manufacturing.
According to relevant reports, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has set up a leading group for tackling key technical problems, requiring everyone who undertakes major tasks to sign a letter of responsibility. Because Huawei-led enterprises have accelerated the beautification process, China is expected to form a 40nm production line without American technology in a short time. In this way, mask aligner's breakthrough should mainly focus on extreme ultraviolet lithography-type mask aligner, aiming at breaking through more advanced manufacturing technology.
Mask aligners alone are not enough. After all, both Samsung and Intel have advanced mask aligner, but they are not as good as TSMC in terms of production capacity and yield. Of course, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also made a major breakthrough in chip manufacturing capacity and yield. Last year, China Academy of Sciences made a technological breakthrough in the manufacture of 2-nanometer chips, and became the first institution in the world to adopt stacked vertical nano-ring-gate transistors with self-aligned gates.
China has begun to speed up the beautification of the road of independent development and production. As far as the current situation is concerned, this is the only way to solve Huawei's dilemma. In the long run, perhaps without Qualcomm's supply, with the increase of scientific research in China, the United States will not be able to stop the rise of China's future chip industry.