20 17n, the market share of domestic RF chips is only 2%. Such a low share is mainly due to China's late entry into RF chips, lack of experience, and insufficient chip product planning and marketing. RF chips rely on the experience of R&D personnel, which makes them the weakness of domestic enterprises.
Skyworks used to be the main supplier of Huawei's RF chips.
But weakness is not equal to blank. Without experience, there will be more people researching and developing, and the time will be accumulated in place, and the lessons left will be made up.
In the final analysis, RF chips have no patent wall and ecological circle to build competition barriers, and it is possible to break through by focusing on research and development.
As early as June 20 19n6, before Huawei was included in the entity list, Huawei Hisilicon began to design its own RF components to make up for the shortcomings in the supply chain. After the entity list was released, Huawei insiders revealed that the gap in the self-sufficiency rate of Huawei's mobile phone business was mainly reflected in the field of radio frequency chips, which relied heavily on American manufacturers and mainly purchased three American companies, Skyworks, Qorvo and Broadcom.
However, in less than a year, Huawei quickly made up for the shortcomings of self-sufficiency in the supply chain.
The newly released disassembly diagram of P40, the flagship mobile phone, shows that Skyworks, Qorvo and Broadcom, three American companies, have completely replaced the RF part, from the transceiver antenna, switch chip, PA (power amplifier) to the filter, and "beautification" is very successful.
As can be seen from the above figure, Huawei has realized the self-research of key RF chips, including LNA, RF switch chip, PA, duplexer, RF switch and RF transceiver chip, and other non-critical spare parts are supported by domestic suppliers.
The foreign suppliers in the above picture include NXP, ST (stmicroelectronics) and Murata. All of them are European and Japanese suppliers, and they are not directly related to the United States, but appear on the supplier list as the second supplier, which is completely different from foreign suppliers in the past.
This shows that the research and development of RF chips is not as difficult as expected, and it is not an order of magnitude with complex digital circuits such as CPU and GPU.