Huawei to end production of leading edge mobile chipsets

Huawei is to end production of its top-of-the- range Kirin mobile processors in September, according to Caixin Global, the Chinese state news site.

“From Sept. 15 onward, our flagship Kirin processors cannot be produced,” Richard Yu (pictured) CEO of Huawei’s consumer unit said at the recent Mate 40 launch, “our AI-powered chips also cannot be processed. This is a huge loss for us.”

The US has barred any fab which uses US manufacturing equipment from making chips for Huawei’s chip subsidiary HiSilicon.

The US has also barred HiSilicon from getting updates to US EDA products.

“Huawei began exploring the chip sector over 10 years ago, starting from hugely lagging behind, to slightly lagging behind, to catching up, and then to a leader,” said Yu, “we invested massive resources for R&D, and went through a difficult process.”

However without up-to-date EDA from Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor, and without access to the only two leading edge logic foundries – TSMC and Samsung – HiSilicon cannot make a state of the art SoC.

Opportunistically, Qualcomm is lobbying the US government to be allowed to sell its 5G chipsets to Huawei, reports Reuters.

Qualcomm has just resolved a licensing issue with Huawei which involves Huawei paying Qualcomm $1.8 billion in the current quarter.

By: DocMemory
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