HiSilicon is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Shenzhen, Guangdong province and wholly owned by Huawei. HiSilicon purchases licenses for CPU designs from ARM Holdings, including the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore, ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore,[2][3] ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Cortex-A57 and also for their Mali graphics cores.[4][5] HiSilicon has also purchased licenses from Vivante Corporation for their GC4000 graphics core.
HiSilicon is reputed to be the largest domestic designer of integrated circuits in China.[6] In 2020, the United States instituted rules that require any American firms providing equipment to HiSilicon or non-American firms who use American technologies or IPR (such as TSMC) that supply HiSilicon to have licenses[7] as part of the ongoing trade dispute, and Huawei announced it will stop producing its Kirin chipsets from 15 September 2020 onwards[8] due to this disruption of its supply chain. On 29 August 2023, Huawei announced the first fully domestically fabricated chip, the Kirin 9000S, which is used on its latest Mate 60 Pro phablet series of phones and MatePad 13.2 tablets.
History
HiSilicon was Huawei's ASIC design center, which was founded in 1991.[9]
- 2004– Shenzhen HiSilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd. was registered and the company was formally established.
- 2016– HiSilicon's Kirin 960 chipset was rated one of the "best of Android 2016" in performance by Android Authority.[10]
- 2019– Shanghai HiSilicon, a wholly owned subsidiary of Huawei, was established.[11]
- 2025– First HiSilicon 7nm N+2 Kirin X90 series PC class in-house ARM-powered chips launched for MateBook Pro, MateBook Fold and MatePad Edge HarmonyOS powered computers following Intel and Qualcomm chip May 2024 bans.
Smartphone application processors
HiSilicon develops SoCs based on the ARM architecture. Though not exclusive, these SoCs see preliminary use in handheld and tablet devices of its parent company Huawei.
K3V2
The first well known product of HiSilicon is the K3V2 used in Huawei Ascend D Quad XL (U9510) smartphones[15] and Huawei MediaPad 10 FHD7 tablets. This chipset is based on the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore fabbed at 40 nm and uses a 16 core Vivante GC4000 GPU.[16] The SoC supports LPDDR2-1066, but actual products are found with LPDDR-900 instead for lower power consumption.
K3V2E
This is a revised version of K3V2 SoC with improved support of Intel baseband. The SoC supports LPDDR2-1066, but actual products are found with LPDDR-900 instead for lower power consumption.
Smartphone modems
HiSilicon develops smartphone modems which are primarily used in its parent company Huawei's handheld and tablet devices.
Wearable SoCs
HiSilicon develops SoCs for wearables such as wireless earbuds, wireless headphones, neckband earbuds, smart speakers, smart eyewear, and smartwatches.[53]
Server processors
HiSilicon develops server processor SoCs based on the ARM architecture.
Hi1610
The Hi1610 is HiSilicon's first generation server processor announced in 2015. It features:
- 16x ARM Cortex-A57 at up to 2.1 GHz[57]
- 48 KB L1-I, 32 KB L1-D, 1 MB L2/4 cores and 16 MB CCN L3
- TSMC 16 nm
- 2x DDR4-1866
- 16 PCIe 3.0
Hi1612
The Hi1612 is HiSilicon's second generation server processor launched in 2016. It is the first chiplet-based Kunpeng with two computing dies. It features:
AI acceleration
HiSilicon also develops AI Acceleration chips.
Da Vinci architecture
Each Da Vinci Max AI Core features a 3D Cube Tensor Computing Engine (4096 FP16 MACs + 8192 INT8 MACs), a vector unit (2048bit INT8/FP16/FP32), and a scalar unit. It includes a new AI framework called "MindSpore", a platform-as-a-service product called ModelArts, and a lower-level library called Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN).
Semiconductor equipment export control by US
The US government started to pressure ASML Holding not to sell new EUV machines to China in 2018.[78]
In 2022, the US government was lobbying the Dutch government to bar ASML from selling older DUV (deep ultraviolet lithography) machines to China. These DUV machines are a generation behind of newer EUV models.[79]
Lam Research and Applied Materials have suspended sales and services to Chinese counterparts in 2022.[80]
In late 2024, the US government expanded export control which will hit semiconductor toolmakers such as KLA Corporation, Lam Research and
See also
- Semiconductor industry
- Semiconductor industry in China
External links
References
- HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd.: Private Company Information Bloomberg, retrieved 18 January 2019^
- HiSilicon Licenses ARM Technology for use in Innovative 3G/4G Base Station, Networking Infrastructure and Mobile Computing Applications, 2 August 2011 on ARM.com^
- HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd. 海思半导体有限公司