Stefan Mileschin

Largest IC design house in Asia title up for grabs

Huawei's IC design subsidiary HiSilicon may take MediaTek’s crown as the largest IC design house in Asia later this year.

The China-based company is set to roll out new chipset solutions to support its parent firm's aggressive deployments in 5G, AI and IoT applications and even to explore global demand from these sectors.

Word on the street is that Huawei is aggressively moving to expand the competitiveness and economy of scale of its ecosystem by adopting in-house developed chip solutions for its new generation servers and new AI and IoT devices in line with the Chinese government's efforts to boost semiconductor self-sufficiency.

As part of all that, HiSilicon is seen as eclipsing MediaTek as Asia's largest IC designer by revenues. HiSilicon's revenues came close to $7.6 billion in 2018, slightly lower than MediaTek's $7.8 billion.

HiSilicon will cash in on substantial global demand for server chips, 5G-related chips, and AI chips. It is developing new chip platforms for smart home, IoT, AI, and enterprise service applications, and Huawei is seeking to expand beyond its current production lines of communication network equipment and mobile devices.

HiSilicon released the world's first 7nm mobile AI chipset Kirin 980 and Balong 5G01 modem chips and is expected to release more advanced AI accelerator chips, server core processors and multimedia chip solutions in 2019.

Digitimes thinks HiSilicon will place more foundry orders with TSMC in the second half of 2019 for its various new chipsets to be fabricated on the 7nm process, the sources indicated.

https://fudzilla.com/news/48428-hisi...diatek-s-crown