By Li Panpan

Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping explained Huawei’s IC strategy in the face of the blockade by the U.S. sanctions, saying it is expecting to make breakthroughs in advanced packaging for boosting its chip products at Huawei’s 2021 annual performance conference held on March 28^th.

He also revealed that Huawei’s IC company HiSilicon has been upgraded from a second-level business unit to a first-level one alongside Huawei’s Cloud computing and Smart Car Solution, indicating more focus on IC development.

Guo said that with interconnection and stacking of different functional dies, advanced packaging could achieve excellent performance in high-performance semiconductor chips with possible applications in data centers and communication base stations, opening a new generation of IC.

Huawei’s emphasis on system architecture means that advanced packaging will be a critical investment direction for Huawei in manufacturing.

For its breakthroughs through advanced packaging, Huawei reportedly has set up partnerships with Quliang Electronics (渠梁电子), a chip packaging and testing supplier based in Fujian Province, and display giant BOE in panel-level chip packaging technology.

Huawei would use the multi-core structure to support chip architecture reconstruction. “It will revive the life of chips, allowing less-advanced processes to be competitive in future products,” Guo said.

Huawei has made progress in some of its theoretical and architectural breakthroughs. Its Noah’s Ark Lab has come up with the innovative algorithm in the open-sourced AdderNet, reducing AI computing power consumption by 88% and circuit area by 76%. It introduced gallium nitride materials to the power amplifier chip, which consumes the most significant amount of energy of the radio frequency part in its base station equipment, improving amplification efficiency and reducing energy consumption by 20%.

If Huawei can develop the system-level packaging of mature-processed bare chips to achieve outstanding performance for mid-to-low-end shelf products, it can gain a different development window with a market potential worth looking forward to and open a new generation.

The advanced packaging process that integrates the front and rear sections will accumulate Huawei’s proprietary knowledge and workforce reserves in the field of semiconductor manufacturing and lay the foundation for possible future breakthroughs in advanced manufacturing processes.