Poor technology will eventually affect the distribution of benefits, and there will even be a gap of ten times or more. Huawei is developing rapidly in the field of 5G, which worries technological powers. In order to suppress the development of Huawei, the cooperative relationship of chip industry balance was broken, and Huawei faced the embarrassing situation that there was no core available. Under the pressure of the situation, Huawei has to explore more possibilities of the chip industry chain alone.
According to DigiTimes, Huawei will establish its first wafer factory in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and it is expected to start production in stages from 2022. According to relevant sources, Huawei's wafer factory mainly produces optical communication chips and modules, thus realizing semiconductor self-sufficiency.
There have been rumors for a long time that Huawei will set up a Haisi factory in Wuhan. One is that Huawei once planned to issue bonds in China, with an initial scale of 3 billion and a medium-term scale of 20 billion. One is that Wuhan once published a plot planning scheme, which also mentioned the Haisiguang factory project.
What is an optical communication chip? Can Huawei completely solve the problem of lack of core?
Unfortunately, the optical communication chip can't solve the problem of Huawei's lack of core, and its application is not in one field. Although most people know Huawei and use personal consumption services such as mobile phones, tablets and smart screens, Huawei is a communications manufacturing company. Optical communication chips are mainly used in the field of optical communication, among which Huawei maintains a leading position in the world. Ren talked about this problem in an early interview. Huawei can achieve 800G optical communication chips, and the United States is still far away.
The global 5G base station market reshuffled again, and Huawei 5G regained the first place. The wafer factory established in Wuhan this time, the optical communication chip is bound to become the powerful cornerstone of Huawei communication, and there will be no more problems like the inability to produce 5G baseband chips.
Before there is a breakthrough in domestic mask aligner, it will be Huawei's best choice to buy chips from outside.
According to domestic experts, pure domestic chips with 28nm process can be realized this year and pure domestic chips with 14nm process can be realized next year. Since it is purely domestic, it will not be limited by the core technology of the United States. Does it mean that domestic mask aligner enterprises can reach the level of 14nm process next year?
Huawei also recently released a technical patent called "a synchronization method between chips and related devices". Many users speculate whether the dual 14nm process chip can reach or approach the performance of a single 7nm process chip.
There are constant discussions on this topic on the Internet, and I am a little conservative, thinking that the possibility of realization is low. Simply relying on the superposition of chips will not produce the effect that one plus one is greater than two, otherwise many technology companies will not be keen on improving the process. Not to question Huawei's scientific research strength, perhaps the patent is not applied in this respect. Aside from performance for the time being, one is the power consumption problem of chip superposition, the other is the temperature problem, and the other is the volume problem, which are not suitable for mobile phone products.
There are indications that Qualcomm has opened the door to supply Huawei chips.
At the release conference of Huawei HarmonyOS system version 2.0, a tablet computer used Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 processor; Another tablet to be released in September will use Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 processor; Huawei Maimang 10SE mobile phone is also equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 480 processor. Qualcomm will launch the Snapdragon 888 processor castrated with 5G function in the near future. According to the news, this processor is also built for Huawei.
The road to self-developed processors is blocked, and external purchase is undoubtedly the best solution. Although the first domestic fab only produces optical communication chips and modules, there is no guarantee that the second and third fabs will not develop in other fields.