September 15 is the time when the US ban on Huawei takes effect.
As of the press's submission, no new voice has been heard from the United States, which means that the ban has not been extended. It also means that from today on, companies such as TSMC, Qualcomm, Samsung, SK Hynix and micron will no longer supply chips and "parts containing American technology" to China.
Where should Huawei go?
Encounter "encirclement, pursuit and interception"
Let's briefly review:
In May this year, the Bureau of industry and security of the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that Huawei would strictly restrict the use of US technology and software to design and manufacture semiconductor chips.
In August, the U.S. Department of commerce further tightened restrictions on Huawei's access to U.S. technology, and added 38 Huawei subsidiaries in 21 countries to the "entity list.".
Zhong Xinlong, a senior consultant at the information and software industry Institute of CCID think tank, explained to the Economic Daily that from September 15, semiconductor companies that use the equipment, software and design and production of American enterprises (the previous technical limit standard was 25%, reduced to 10% in December last year, and now it has become 0) are not allowed to supply goods to China without the approval of the US government 。
This means that chip companies using any technology in the United States can not cooperate with Huawei in any form, nor can they sell chips to Huawei, completely cutting off all channels from Huawei seeking OEM manufacturing to purchasing finished chips.
Under the ban, TSMC, Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek and micron all announced that they would not be able to supply Huawei after September 15. According to South Korean media reported on September 9, Samsung and SK Hynix will stop selling parts to China from September 15. Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics's Samsung and LG displays are expected to stop supplying panels to Huawei's high-end smartphones from September 15.
"It can be seen that not only computing chips and memory chips, but also panel driver chips and other key links in Huawei's supply chain have been" chased and blocked "by the United States Zhong Xinlong said.
Bypassing "American technology" is not feasible
Many people ask, can't Huawei and even China make their own chips without us technology?
The answer is no!
Not to mention, economic globalization brought about by the industrial chain of global division pattern, no one can do anything by themselves.
Let's talk about the chip industry. As we all know, high-end chips are a long-term money burning industry with high intellectual property barriers, industrial barriers and patent barriers, which can not be broken through in a day.
So far, Huawei's breakthrough is only in the field of chip design, but also in the arm public platform architecture for customized development. Of course, not only Huawei, but also the chips of giants such as apple, Qualcomm and Samsung have to be customized and developed on this architecture. It can be said that ARM architecture has become a global monopoly in the field of mobile computing.
What's more, according to foreign media reports, on September 13, US local time, NVIDIA, an American chipmaker, announced that it would buy arm for $40 billion. Obviously, this acquisition will lead to the further improvement of the US's ability to restrict China's chip industry.
Others ask, can chip makers bypass the United States?
Previously, industry experts said that the OEM manufacturer of 5g chips is mainly TSMC, and its 7-nanometer process is second to none. At present, Samsung's chip manufacturing process maturity, sophistication and yield rate are not as good as TSMC. The majority of TSMC's shares are owned by the United States, according to online public data.
Therefore, as Li Zhen, an industry research analyst at the Innovation Research Institute of Peking University Science and Technology Park, summed up: "although Huawei's Hisilicon has become one of the top ten semiconductor manufacturers in the world, it has not set foot in the fields of chip packaging and manufacturing, and the development of the industrial chain is not sound, so it is facing the problem of current bottlenecks. We have to admit that Huawei's self-made high-end chips have become a thing of the past after Huawei's power failure. Huawei does not have a perfect chip production capacity. In the future, survival in related fields will be the key word. "
What about Huawei?
It is undeniable that the interruption of supply will have a huge impact on Huawei.
Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, admitted at the 2020 summit of China's 100 people's Conference on information technology held on August 7, "Huawei's smartphone market share ranked first in the world in the second quarter of this year. If it wasn't for the US sanctions, Huawei would have been far ahead in terms of market share last year. Because of the sanctions, Huawei delivered 60 million fewer smartphones last year. "
Yu Chengdong also said that Huawei's Kirin series chips could not be manufactured after September 15 due to the crisis of supply interruption, and the upcoming Huawei mate 40 may become the last generation of mobile phones to adopt Huawei's Kirin high-end chips.
Facing such a dilemma, what should Huawei do?
On the afternoon of September 14, Yu Chengdong said: mate 40 will arrive as scheduled!
On the one hand, Huawei has been actively hoarding chips and slowing down the speed of mobile phone shipment, trying to survive first.
In May, the U.S. introduced regulatory measures to give a 120 day buffer period, which the industry believes takes into account the chip production cycle, including back-end packaging testing. Huawei also actively used the 120 day buffer period to hoard goods.
According to various sources, Huawei has recently contracted a special cargo plane, which will reach 1.2 before September 14