This article will comprehensively sort out Huawei's chip industry layout. The article will focus on the following content in order:
1. A retrospective of Huawei's 30-year chip research journey
2. The fast-growing dual-base computing chip: Kunpeng, Shengteng
3. From catching up to leading mobile phone SoC chip: Kirin
4. Core chips for 5G communication equipment supremacy: Barong and Tiangang
5. Connected chips for the Internet of Things: Boudica, Lingxiao
6. The video chip that started from the security and emphasized in the display: Honghu
01
Huawei's 30-year chip self-research journey backtrackingIn 1991, Huawei's chip business just started, and the IC Design Center was in charge. At that time, Huawei was facing the dilemma of high chip costs and small product profit margins. The first successful chip is SD502, which is used for switch multi-function interface control. In 1993, relying on EDA software purchased overseas, Huawei successfully developed SD509 that supports non-blocking time slot switching and used it in the first digital program-controlled switch C&C08 independently developed. This switch became one of the world's largest sales switches.
In 1995, Huawei's Central Research Department was established with a basic business department to take over the research and development of communication system chips.
In 2004, Huawei decided to establish HiSilicon, starting with digital security chips. In 2009, a one-stop solution for GSM low-end smartphones was launched, the chip was named K3V1, which opened a long way to explore mobile phone chips. Since then, Huawei's 2012 laboratory was established, and HiSilicon was under the jurisdiction of the laboratory, but its status was equivalent to that of Huawei's first-level department.
After 30 years of hard exploration, Huawei currently has five series of chips. Kirin chips are mobile phone SoC chips that integrate application processors and baseband processors and are widely used in Huawei series mobile phones. Among the computing chips, Kunpeng is used for high-performance computing, and it has become a commercial AI chip. Among the communication chips, Barong and Tiangang are used for baseband and base station respectively, and are building a 5G layout. Connected chips correspond to the era of the Internet of Everything, including the two major brands of Boudica and Lingxiao. Video chips are Huawei's long-term efforts. Security chips and set-top box chips occupy a large market share, and chip shipments have reached tens of millions.
02
The fast-rising dual-base computing chip: Kunpeng, ShengtengIn today's digital age, the Internet of Everything has brought explosive growth in the amount of data, placing higher requirements on the computing capabilities of IT infrastructure. IDC predicts that by 2023, the global computing industry investment space will reach 1.14 trillion U.S. dollars, with China accounting for nearly 10%, which is an important driver for the development of the global computing industry.
In order to meet the demand for new computing power, Huawei has built a chip family of five subsystems of “computing, storing, transmitting, managing, and intelligent” around the “Kunpeng + Shengteng” dual computing power engine, and has realized a comprehensive self-research in the field of computing chips. Huawei is the only manufacturer that has five key chips at the same time: "CPU, NPU, storage control, network interconnection, and intelligent management". We will focus on the core chip "Kunpeng + Shengteng" analysis.
| Layout 1: Kunpeng Series
The Kunpeng series includes servers and PC processors. As early as more than ten years ago, the embedded CPU Hi1380 developed by Huawei made a small difference and became the beginning of the Kunpeng processor. After the two generations of Kunpeng 912 and 916 products, the current flagship products Kunpeng 920 and Kunpeng 920s were finally developed for servers and PCs respectively.
The Kunpeng processor has the advantage of "end-side cloud computing power isomorphism". Based on the ARM V8 architecture, the processor core, micro-architecture and chips are all independently developed and designed by Huawei. There are currently more than 5 million Android applications based on the ARM instruction set on the market, which are naturally compatible with the ARM server and can be run directly without transplantation. There is no instruction translation link during the operation, and there is no performance loss. Compared with X86 heterogeneous, it can improve up to 3 Times performance.
In January 2019, Huawei announced the launch of the industry's highest performance ARM architecture processor-Kunpeng 920, as well as the TaiShan server and Huawei cloud services based on Kunpeng 920.
Kunpeng 920 uses a 7nm manufacturing process. In terms of specifications, it supports 64 cores, the main frequency is up to 2.6GHz, integrated 8-channel DDR4, supports PCIe4.0 and CCIX interfaces, and can provide a total bandwidth of 640Gbps. Kunpeng 920 focuses on low power consumption and strong performance. At a typical main frequency, the SPECint Benchmark score exceeds 930, which exceeds the industry benchmark by 25%. At the same time, the energy efficiency ratio is 30% better than the industry benchmark. The previous record holder is Fujitsu's 7nm A64X, each chip can reach 2.7 teraflops of performance.
| Layout 2: Shengteng Series
With the gradual failure of Moore's Law, AI chips can help solve the computing power problem. The Shengteng series is an important support for Huawei's comprehensive AI strategy. At the 2018 Huawei Full Connect Conference, Shengteng 310 and 910 were released at the same time, confirming outside speculation about Huawei's development of AI chips.
Shengteng 310 is oriented to edge scenarios, which is efficient, flexible and programmable. Based on a typical configuration, the performance under 8-bit integer precision (INT8) reaches 16TOPS, and the performance under 16-bit floating point number (FP16) reaches 8 TFLOPS, while its power consumption is only 8W. Based on the mass-produced Shengteng 310, Huawei released Atlas 200, Atlas 300, Atlas 500, Atlas 800 and other products, which are widely used in security, finance, medical, transportation, power, automotive and other industries.
The Shengteng 910 is oriented to training scenarios and has ultra-high computing power. Its maximum power consumption is 310W. The self-developed Da Vinci architecture greatly improves its energy efficiency ratio. The performance under eight-bit integer precision reaches 512TOPS, and the performance under 16-bit floating point number reaches 256 TFLOPS. The test performance of the Shengteng 910 far exceeds that of NVIDIA Tesla V100 and Google TPU v3. In August 2019, the 910 was officially released, marking a new stage in the implementation of Huawei's AI strategy.
In the future, for different scenarios, Huawei will continue to introduce more AI processors to provide more abundant, more economical, and more adaptable AI computing power. Some of Huawei’s AI chips under research and planning include upgrades for autonomous driving development. Teng 610, 310 upgraded from 320 (planned to launch in 2021) and 910 upgraded from 920.
03
From catching up to leading SoC chip: KirinMobile phone SoC (System-on-a-Chip) chip is composed of application processor (AP) and baseband processor (BP). Among them, AP includes CPU (central processing unit), GPU (graphics processing unit), ISP (image processor), etc., responsible for operating system, user interface and application processing; BP includes baseband and radio frequency parts, responsible for communication signal processing.
In recent years, major chip manufacturers have begun to develop SoC chips to provide overall solutions, and Huawei HiSilicon is also actively deploying. From a technical point of view, the difficulty of SoC chip research and development lies in the integration and collaboration of various components.
Huawei started with an unsuccessful product-K3V1. In 2006, HiSilicon, which was established for two years, was inspired by MediaTek and began to research mobile phone chips. Three years later, it launched its first application processor, K3V1, but due to 110nm The craftsmanship lags far behind the mainstream solutions at the time, and it corresponds to the Windows Phone system, which ultimately failed to go on the market. In 2012, K3V2 was released. The technology is still relatively backward and the heat is serious, but the performance gap is narrowing. It is mounted on Huawei D, P and Mate series, which stimulates the improvement of chip technology.
The turning point finally appeared in 2013. HiSilicon launched the first mobile phone SoC chip-Kirin 910, which is the world's first quad-core SoC chip, using the mainstream 28nm process at the time, matching Mali 450MP4 GPU, and integrating self-developed Barong 710 baseband. Applied to Huawei P6s. This appearance laid the foundation for greater success.
Since then, Kirin 920, 925, 928, 930, 935, 950, 960, 970, 980 and 620, 650, 710, 810 for mid-range mobile phones have been released successively, and the process technology has been continuously upgraded, realizing from catching up to side by side. The transformation to the leader.
Among them, Kirin 925 was applied to Huawei Mate7, and the global sales exceeded 7 million; 620 was applied to the mid-range Honor 4X and 4C, and the sales of Honor 4X exceeded 10 million; 930 marked the mobile phone chip entering the 64-bit era; 950, 970, 980 took the lead in the world to commercialize 16nm, 10nm and 7nm processes respectively; 970 also integrated the artificial intelligence computing platform NPU in the SoC chip for the first time, creating a precedent for end-side AI. The cumulative shipment of Mate 10 equipped with this chip reached 10 million units.
In September 2019, Huawei's latest generation of flagship chips, the Kirin 990 series, was launched, including Kirin 990 and Kirin 990 5G chips, using 7nm+ technology. The sentence was changed to the former using 7nm technology and the latter using 7nm+ technology. Among them, Kirin 990 5G is the world's first flagship 5G SoC chip. It integrates 5G Modem into SoC chip for the first time. It is the first to support NSA/SA dual architecture and TDD/FDD full frequency band. It is the industry's first full Netcom 5G SoC. Based on Barong 5000's 5G connection, Kirin 990 5G has achieved a 5G peak download rate of 2.3Gbps, and a 5G uplink peak rate of 1.25Gbps.
04
Core chips for 5G communication equipment supremacy: Barong and Tiangang| Layout 1: Barong series baseband chip
The baseband chip is used to synthesize the baseband signal to be transmitted and decode the received baseband signal. Beginning in 2007, Huawei began to develop baseband chips because the baseband chips of Huawei’s popular product data cards at the time depended on Qualcomm and were often out of stock. In 2010, Huawei launched the first TD-LTE baseband chip-Barong 700, breaking the monopoly of Qualcomm. In 2014, on the Kirin 910, Huawei integrated the baseband chip and AP on a SoC for the first time. At present, the global cumulative shipments of Barong 4G series chipsets have exceeded 100 million, with a complete product portfolio, with capabilities ranging from Cat 4 to Cat 19, and corresponding single connection rates ranging from 150Mbps to 1.6Gbps.
In February 2018, Huawei released the Barong 5G01 baseband chip. It is the first commercial 5G chip based on 3GPP standards, but it is relatively large. Previously, Qualcomm released the industry’s first 5G modem, the Snapdragon X50, but it was not based on 3GPP. Standard, and only supports 5G networks and is not compatible with previous generation networks.
In January 2019, Huawei released the Barong 5000. Its small size, high integration, support 5G and previous generation network standards. Barong 5000 is the first to achieve the industry benchmark 5G peak download rate, 4.6Gbps in the Sub-6GHz (low frequency band, the main 5G frequency band) frequency band, and 6.5Gbps in the millimeter wave (high frequency band, 5G extended frequency band) frequency band , Which is 10 times the experience rate of 4G LTE. Huawei stated that Barong 5000 can be used in scenarios such as home broadband terminals and vehicle terminals in addition to smart phones.
| Layout 2: Tiangang series base station chip
Tiangang is the industry's first 5G base station core chip and has made breakthroughs in integration, computing power, and spectrum bandwidth. For the first time, Tiangang supports large-scale integration of active power amplifiers and passive arrays under extremely low sky size specifications; it achieves a 2.5 times increase in computing power, is equipped with the latest algorithms and beamforming, and a single chip can control up to 64 channels; Extremely wide spectrum, supporting 200M operator spectrum bandwidth. The Tiangang chip has brought a revolutionary improvement to the active antenna processing unit, reducing the size of the base station by over 50%, reducing the weight by 23%, saving power consumption by 21%, and cutting installation time by half compared with standard 4G base stations.
05
Link chips born for the Internet of Things: Boudica, Lingxiao| Layout 1: Boudica series NB-IOT chip
NB-IoT (NarrowBand Internet of Things) focuses on the low-power, wide-coverage Internet of Things (IoT) market. It can be widely used in vertical industries such as smart parking, smart agriculture, and remote meter reading. It has low power consumption and connectivity. Stability, low cost, and excellent structure optimization. In recent years, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the three major operators have provided support to varying degrees. However, due to technical factors, the development of NB-IoT is still relatively slow, and the terminal chip is one of the core difficulties.
Huawei began research and development of NB-IoT chips in 2014. In 2015, a chip prototype product based on pre-standards was launched. In September 2016, the industry's first commercial NB-IoT chip Boudica 120 was released. Since then, the fully mature Boudica 150 supporting 3GPPR14 has been introduced, which can achieve lower energy consumption and be applied in more scenarios. In April 2019, Huawei disclosed that the shipment of Boudica 120 exceeded 7 million; the shipment of Boudica 150 with better performance exceeded 13 million. Huawei expects to launch Boudica200 in 2020, support 3GPPR15 and subsequent standard evolution, and have better integration, security and openness.
| Layout 2: Lingxiao series WiFi chip
In the actual use of routers, problems such as dropped calls, delays, and freezes are common. To solve these problems, Huawei has developed the Lingxiao series of routing chips, which consist of three product lines: routing CPU, routing WiFi chip, and power cat chip. . In December 2018, the Lingxiao chip was officially unveiled. The Honor Router Pro 2 is equipped with Lingxiao 5651 and Lingxiao 1151. Among them, Lingxiao 5651 is a quad-core 1.4GHz CPU, and Lingxiao 1151 is a dual-band Wi-Fi chip.
At the 2019 Huawei Developer Conference (HDC2019), Huawei officially released Lingxiao WiFi-loT chips to serve Huawei's full-scenario smart life strategy. The chip will be listed at the end of 2019 and is used in home access products.
06
The video chip that started from security and focused on display: Honghu| Layout 1: Security chip
Security products require four types of chips: ISP (Image Signal Processing) chip to process the signals collected by the front-end camera, DVR (Digital Hard Disk Video Recorder) SoC chip for analog audio and video digitization, encoding compression and storage, IPC (IP Camera) SoC The chip supports video analysis, and the NVR (Network Hard Disk Video Recorder) SoC chip is used for video data storage.
HiSilicon’s chip business started in the security field, first mass-produced security chips, and it thrived in competition with giants such as Texas Instruments and Broadcom. Different from the ARM+DSP architecture adopted by Texas Instruments, HiSilicon adopts the ARM+IVE architecture, which has advantages in power consumption, cost and operational efficiency. At present, HiSilicon is the world leader in IPC chips, with a market share of as high as 70% at one time; in the other three types of chips, HiSilicon also has a higher market share. In terms of market development, HiSilicon has maintained close cooperation with Hikvision and Dahua for a long time.
| Layout 2: Set-top box chip
While making great achievements in the field of security chips, HiSilicon also began to actively develop set-top box chips in 2008, and has emerged in the competition with STMicroelectronics and Qualcomm. It has basically achieved the first place in the country and the second place in the world. Broadcom. Smart set-top box chip solutions are divided into OTT and IPTV. According to Glan Research, in 2018, the chip solutions adopted by my country's IPTV/OTT set-top boxes are mainly Hisilicon and Jingchen.
| Layout 3: Honghu series display chip
Honghu chips are mainly used in the field of smart display. Huawei has accumulated for many years, and HiSilicon launched its first 4K TV chip in 2014. Huawei revealed in 2019 that the cumulative shipment of Honghu video display chips has exceeded 40 million.
In July 2019, Huawei's Honor Smart Screen was the first to be equipped with the Honghu 818 chip. Honghu 818 uses dual A73+ dual A53 architecture CPU and 4*Mali-G51 GPU, leading the decoding speed. Honghu 818 has seven-layer image quality technologies such as dynamic picture compensation and high dynamic range imaging, and integrates Histen sound quality optimization technology, which can bring users an excellent audio and video experience.
At present, Huawei's five major chip series are going hand in hand, achieving breakthroughs in their respective fields and successfully embarking on a "counterattack" road. Looking back at Huawei's chip business in 1991 when it just started, it was the awakening of chip independence that laid the groundwork for its current glory; it was through trial and error step by step that an independent design road was taken. Looking forward to the future, with the continuous rise of my country’s independent innovation forces, the IT industry based on "China Core" is bound to usher in huge opportunities. As a domestic light, Huawei is expected to lead the industry under the strategy of "open source and openness" The rapid rise of chain-related companies.
Edit | Chen Jinglan
Proofreading | Zhong Miaoli
Source | Xingye Computer Team
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