The U.S. Cut off Chip Supply for Huawei

As the September 15 deadline approaches, the Trump administration has cut off Huawei ability to get chips from commercial channels,from this day, TSMC, Qualcomm, MediaTek and other companies officially "cut off" Huawei.

This is a dark day for Huawei, the Chinese tech giant. Huawei‘s products, from mobile phones ,5G base stations, to servers, and even a variety of Internet devices, all rely on chips. For a hardware-based technology enterprise, no chip means no product, no enterprise.

For more than 30 years, in the second quarter of this year, Huawei smartphones sales volume is more than Samsung, topping the world‘s highest sales for the first time. However, immediately after the third quarter facing a comprehensive "broken core ". it may be forced to give way for the first time.

Huawei is forced into the "coreless available" dilemma

At first, there was room under the government‘s ban, and the industry also said Huawei could buy chips from MediaTek. Huawei have also thought of ways, for example, after the "cut supply ", Huawei low-end models can use other chips to replace Kirin chips. SMIC has provided Huawei with a low-end phone chip, Kirin 710 A,, in May and is used on glory Play 4T phones.

MediaTek, like Huawei Hayes, belongs to the category of Fabless( wafer-free manufacturing design) and is only responsible for the circuit design and sale of chips. The EDA software, the architecture of the ARM, the core of the chip, and the chip manufacturing are all outsourced, which must involve American technology. SMIC‘s situation is the same, inseparable from American technology.

Therefore, as the ban gradually tightened, Qualcomm, Samsung, SK Hercules, Micron, TSMC, including SMIC, have stated that they will no longer be able to contract for Huawei chips.

The new ban cut off the Huawei‘s search for cooperation with non-u.s. suppliers and pushed Huawei directly into a "coreless" dilemma. Huawei consumer business CEO Yu Chengdong also regretted at the recent China Information 100 Summit that the new generation of 5 nm chip Kirin 9000 may become the Huawei Kirin series of chips "out of print ".

This is not the end of the event. At present, Sino-US relations, the global epidemic, the United States election, are in uncertainty, the United States government crackdown on Huawei ban, will change.

What will happen if the ban continues,how to deal with it.

One idea is to replace import with domestic, that is, to replace high performance with low performance parallel, and to replace new process with old process.

To users, it is no different or even faster than using traditional foreign systems, but in fact the system uses a large number of low-end CPU, including domestic CPU chips using non-up-to-date processes, or old Intel chips years ago ."

From the technical point of view, the super-strength load of the chip, itself will be damaged. In fact, foreign servers use for a period of time, even if these chips are not broken, to prevent errors, will also change the chip.

Other domestic brands will have great development opportunities 

Meanwhile, it must be noted that the u.s. cut off Huawei supply, not to all chinese mobile phone manufacturers, xiaomi, vivo、oppo、 zte, can be supplied normally. 

Huawei can continue, just wait for time 

Huawei could survive as a component supplier, even though the Huawei was ultimately unsupported by the u.s. government ban.

Huawei, for example, now has a screen drive chip project, a series of new projects to be developed, and even later only reduced maintenance for cars or OLED drivers, as well as other peripheral products such as laptops and tablets

From the technical point of view, the super-strength load of the chip, itself will be damaged. In fact, foreign servers use for a period of time, even if these chips are not broken, to prevent errors, will also change the chip.