Finally, on May 5, 2020 15, the United States listed Huawei as an "entity list". In terms of chip technology, if a manufacturer wants to cooperate with Huawei, it must obtain permission from the US Department of Commerce, even if the manufacturer is outside the United States, such as TSMC in Taiwan Province Province, China. In this way, any company in the world that uses American technology can be prohibited from doing business cooperation with Huawei. This ban will take effect in September, which means that after that, no company in the world can OEM chips for Huawei. After more than ten years' development, Huawei Hisilicon chip design has become the fifth largest chip design company after Broadcom, Qualcomm, NVIDIA and MediaTek. The Kirin series mobile phone chips designed by Huawei have the same performance and power consumption as the Snapdragon series mobile phone chips of Qualcomm, and are widely used in Huawei and Glory series mobile phones. In addition to Kirin series mobile phone chips, there are Kunpeng, Baron, Lingxiao and plough chips in the open sea. Before being sanctioned, Huawei's mobile phone business ranked first in the domestic market, and Huawei also extensively explored the European market, second only to Apple and Samsung in the European high-end mobile phone market.
Back to Huawei's chips, why does Huawei have Kirin series mobile phone chips? Why is it afraid of US sanctions? Can Huawei only sell mobile phones in China, but not go abroad? The answer is no, because there are many steps in the production and design of chips, mainly including four steps: chip design, production, packaging and testing. Huawei is only responsible for the first step of chip manufacturing: design, not chip production. Not only Huawei, but also Apple's A series mobile phone chips and MediaTek's mobile phone chips. Samsung's ability to design and produce chips is stronger, but it still cannot realize the whole process of chip manufacturing. At present, only Intel is the only manufacturer that can independently design, produce, package and test the whole process. So far, Intel is still squeezing toothpaste to update chips.
The four steps of design, production, packaging and testing all involve American patented technology. First, the design of the chip. At present, even though the SOC models of mobile phones are varied, all mobile phone chips are based on the architecture designed by British ARM company. On 20 1 1 year, ARM officially released V8 architecture. Huawei obtained the permanent authorization of V8 architecture before being sanctioned, and can continue to use this architecture to design mobile phone chips after being sanctioned. On March 3 1 this year, ARM officially released the latest V9 architecture to chip designers. The company said that ARMV9 will be used in the next 300 billion ARM chips. Compared with V8 architecture, V9 has achieved more than 30% performance improvement and greatly improved security. Processors with this architecture can be used in 5G mobile communication, mobile computing, PC, server and HPC high-performance computing.
Fortunately, ARM claims that it is a British company and is not affected by US sanctions. Huawei still got the authorization of V9 architecture in its architecture release. However, it is impossible to design a chip only through the authorization of the architecture. At present, mobile phone chips contain more than 65.438+000 billion transistors, such as 65.438+053 billion transistors in Kirin 9000. All these transistors should be placed on a silicon substrate with an area of only 654.38+000 square millimeters. It can't be drawn by hand at all, and it must be aided by computer software. At present, there are three good CAD softwares in the world: Xinsi Technology, Ming Dow International and Deng Kai Electronics, all of which are American companies. After receiving the sanction documents, all three companies indicated that they would terminate their cooperation with Huawei. At present, domestic CAD software companies have Huada Jiutian Company, which can help Huawei. In terms of production steps, TSMC is the strongest chip manufacturer in the world at present, while Samsung in the same industry is not as good as TSMC in technology and yield. Intel only produces its own X86 chips, so it is impossible to contract for Huawei.
In terms of digital infrastructure, the United States has always been the world's hegemon, charging countless patent fees to the world every year. In the era of 2G and 3G, China has been using foreign communication equipment such as Nokia and Cisco, and we have been able to keep pace with foreign manufacturers in 4G. In the 5G era, Huawei has 3 147 patents, making it the company with the largest number of 5G patents in the world.
In other words, we have mastered the right to speak as stipulated in the 5G standard, we can export communication equipment to other countries, and we can charge royalties, which is unacceptable to the United States. So the United States will definitely start to sanction our technology companies from here.
Back to Ali, Tencent and other companies, Tencent has an unshakable position in the fields of entertainment and social software. Games, variety shows and real-time communication software are its main businesses. In 2020, Tencent's revenue was 482.064 billion yuan, its profit was 65.438+022.742 billion yuan, and its profit rate was 25.4%. Ali has the largest e-commerce platform, and the annual Double Eleven activities are constantly refreshing the previous records.
Why hasn't this company with such a large market value been sanctioned? Because similar companies only develop their own technology on the basis of hardware manufacturers, all their functions are realized on the basis of complete hardware. Without a lot of hardware, any fancy functions will only be fantasy, such as common social software. We need to chat with family or friends. First of all, we need a computer or mobile phone, which is the most basic requirement. They don't produce any important components such as processors, communication baseband and cameras. The whole technology industry is like a pyramid, and hardware manufacturers are equivalent to the base of the pyramid, while enterprises like BTA are like the spire of the pyramid, which can be very high and sharp, but this premise must be that the base is stable enough. If the United States wants to sanction China's science and technology industry, it will naturally start with the base. When the base starts to shake, the upper floor will also collapse. You know, I'm not afraid to hit you today, but I don't want to hit you yet. However, at this point, we must not lose heart. With the strong support of the state, China's chip industry has made great progress. For example, SMIC has conquered the process of 14nm, and the CAD software of Huada Jiutian has surpassed foreign software in some aspects. What we need to do is to support companies like Huawei and make the whole industry chain develop in coordination. Even if Hess's chip doesn't go on in the end, it can't stop us from going forward.