Dismantling Huawei's 5G small base station: Domestic parts account for 55% of the cost, while the United States only accounts for 1%

Latest update time：2023-01-09 16:26

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According to the Nikkei Chinese website, Nikkei Business News dismantled Huawei's 5G small base station with the assistance of Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, which is engaged in the disassembly investigation business of smartphones and auto parts. Dismantling found that China-made components accounted for 55% of the cost, which was 7% higher than the original large base station. American components account for 27% of the large base stations and only 1% of the small base stations dismantled this time. It can be seen that under the confrontation between China and the United States, Huawei has further accelerated its conversion to domestic parts, focusing on electronic components.

Power control semiconductor with Huawei logo installed on the motherboard

When Japanese fomalhaut dismantled the Huawei baseband unit disassembled in the laboratory, the motherboard was printed with "Hi1382 TAIWAN", indicating that it was a chip designed by Huawei HiSilicon, and "TAIWAN" indicated that the chip was manufactured by TSMC. Taken together, components made in China account for 48.2%, and American chips and other components account for more than 27.2% of the total cost of 5G base stations.

This time, the Nikkei Business News dismantled Huawei's 5G small base station. The results showed that after adding up the component prices to calculate the cost, it was found that the proportion of domestic components on the 5G small base station was more than half, and the American components were only 1% is basically invisible.

The main semiconductors of this small base station are products of HiSilicon Semiconductor, a Chinese semiconductor design company under Huawei, and it does not carry major American components such as "FPGA (field programmable gate array)", an important semiconductor used for communication control.

According to Fomalhaut, the actual manufacturer of HiSilicon Semiconductor's products is TSMC, and it is estimated that it uses inventory that was increased before the United States imposed a semiconductor export ban.

Not long ago, the global smartphone AP (application processor) market report for the third quarter of 2022 released by the market research organization Counterpoint Research showed that Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin chip shipments are getting closer to 0 . Huawei HiSilicon, which has attracted much attention, originally had a 1% share in the first quarter, which dropped to 0.4% in the second quarter, but it was almost 0% in the third quarter. This means that Huawei has emptied its inventory of HiSilicon Kirin chips, and due to the US ban, Huawei cannot obtain chips from foundries such as TSMC and Samsung.

In addition, the semiconductors on Huawei's base stations have previously used products from Analog Devices and ON Semiconductor of the United States. However, during the disassembly, it was found that the analog semiconductors used to control power and process signals such as radio waves were printed with Huawei's LOGO. Therefore, it is judged to be a product designed by Huawei itself, but the manufacturer is unknown.

Designing analog semiconductors requires technology, and it has been considered difficult to achieve quality that can be used for communications in China. According to the French research company Yole, "In 2019, it was confirmed for the first time that Huawei produced its own semiconductors for power amplifiers using gallium arsenide as a material." Some of the analog semiconductors installed in this 5G small base station may not use silicon materials, but gallium arsenide, which has better high-speed processing properties and is more difficult to purchase.

According to British research company Omdia, 5G Small Cell shipments are estimated to be 2.8 million units in 2024, which will reach 3.5 times the level in 2020. Omdia pointed out that in the Small Cell market, the Asia-Pacific market accounts for more than 50% of the overall market, and China is the largest market. In 2020, Huawei's global shipment market share reached more than 20%, leading competitors such as Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia.

Source: Comprehensive collection of online content such as Nikkei Chinese website