RF chips are a type of analog chip (CPU, GPU, etc. are digital chips) and are known as the crown jewel of analog chips. It can be seen that research and development is indeed difficult, but it is not as difficult as CPU and GPU. The latter two exceed RF chips by several orders of magnitude. In this regard, Huawei has given a good answer, and I will do a detailed analysis later.
In 2017n, the market share of domestic RF chips was only 2%. Such a low share is mainly due to the fact that China entered radio frequency chips late and has less experience. There are shortcomings in chip product planning and market promotion. And radio frequency chips rely on the experience of R&D personnel, making it a domestic enterprise. Weaknesses.
The American company Skyworks was once Huawei’s main supplier of radio frequency chips.
But weakness does not mean a blank slate. There is no experience, but with more R&D people and time accumulated, the missed lessons can be made up.
In the final analysis, radio frequency chips do not have patent walls and ecosystems to build competition barriers, and they can be broken through concentrated research and development.
As early as June 2019, before Huawei was included in the entity list, Huawei HiSilicon began to design its own radio frequency components to make up for supply chain shortcomings. After the entity list was released, Huawei insiders revealed that the gap in the self-sufficiency rate of Huawei's mobile phone business is mainly reflected in the field of radio frequency chips, which relies heavily on American manufacturers, mainly purchasing from three American companies: Skyworks, Qorvo, and Broadcom.
However, less than a month later, Huawei quickly made up for the shortcomings of its supply chain self-sufficiency.
The latest disassembly of the flagship mobile phone P40 shows that in terms of radio frequency spare parts, from transceiver antennas, switch chips, PA (power amplifiers) to filters, it has fully replaced the three American companies of Skyworks, Qorvo and Broadcom. , "de-beautification" was very successful.
As can be seen from the above figure, Huawei has implemented self-development on key RF chips, including LNA, RF switch chips, PAs, duplexers, RF switches, and RF transceiver chips, and other non-critical chips have been developed by Huawei. Spare parts are supported by domestic suppliers.
The foreign suppliers in the picture above, including NXP (NXP), ST (STMicroelectronics), Murata, etc., are all European and Japanese suppliers and have no direct relationship with the United States, and they are as The second supplier appears in the supplier list, which is completely different from the past when foreign suppliers were solely responsible.
This shows that the development of radio frequency chips is not as difficult as imagined. Compared with complex digital circuits such as CPUs and GPUs, it is not at the same level.