The future path of HiSilicon Spreadtrum and Rockchip, the Chinese chip players

Latest update time：2015-03-11

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OFweek Electronic Engineering Network News: At MWC2015, mobile phone chip manufacturers have been active. Qualcomm released its own 64-bit core Snapdragon 820, MediaTek released its new high-end brand helio, and Samsung combined new products, Exynos 7420 to stun the audience.

Chinese chips are much more low-key. Kirin 930 was launched with Honor X2, but did not receive much attention. Rockchip is only going to enter the low-end market. How should Chinese chips respond to the aggressive international giants?

Survive or Destroy: The Future of China's Mobile Phone Chips

For a long time, Chinese mobile phones have used foreign chips. China's microprocessor industry is very weak and cannot produce chips for mobile phones. Mobile phone chips are a high-end industry that Chinese people cannot get involved in.

The first turning point was the copycat phone market. In the era when feature phones were evolving into color screens, MTK emerged as a dark horse and achieved great success in the copycat phone market. If Taiwanese people can do it, why can't mainlanders do it?

Spreadtrum was founded by overseas returnees from Tsinghua University. Starting with baseband chips and then developing SOCs that integrate baseband and application chips, Spreadtrum quickly became MTK's main competitor and emerged as a dark horse in the era of feature phones.

After feature phones came the era of smart phones. For a long time, HiSilicon was not well known, but Huawei K3 told people that Huawei also had chips. Although it was a wrong bet by choosing the WM route, the name of HiSilicon has been remembered by people.

China's 3G standard is TD, which is closely related to Datang in the "Giant China" back then. Datang's chip department is Unigroup, which, with the rise of TD, also became a member of China's "core".

Rockchip has just joined the battle. It started with MP3 and has continued to develop PMP and tablets with remarkable performance. Its cost control ability is valued by Intel and it has become a heavyweight partner. Intel provides the X86 core and Infineon's communication foundation, which enables Rockchip to enter the smartphone market from tablets and become the latest game player.

As a result, HiSilicon, Spreadtrum, Leadchip and Rockchip have become the main players in China's mobile phone "cores".

Different status quo

In the era of feature phones, Spreadtrum had a very good life, but in the era of smartphones, Spreadtrum has been unable to keep up.

Smart phones require high-performance licenses at high prices, but Spreadtrum's products are always one step behind others. The research and development difficulty of 3G and 4G basebands is also much greater than that of 2G, which makes Spreadtrum somewhat unable to cope.

In 2014, Spreadtrum was acquired by Tsinghua Unigroup. There are rumors that the country will support Spreadtrum in the future to replace foreign mobile phone chips to ensure security, but rumors are just rumors. Currently, Spreadtrum is not doing well.

Similar to Spreadtrum is Unigroup. Unigroup did not purchase high-performance ARM cores, but only made some of the cheapest low-end chips. However, with the overperformance of smartphones, low-end chips are also good to use, and Unigroup still has certain competitiveness. Not long ago, Xiaomi invested in Unigroup, and it is said that it will use Unigroup's chips to launch the 399 yuan Redmi. If the rumors are true, then Unigroup will have a good time in the future.

HiSilicon has been in the limelight in the past two years. HiSilicon's advantage is that it has strong financial support from Huawei and can buy ARM cores at will. Just look at the recent list of A72 core buyers, HiSilicon is on it.

HiSilicon also has an advantage in that it has the full support of Huawei mobile phones. When HiSilicon's performance is poor and power consumption is too high, Huawei mobile phones do not hesitate to reduce the product experience and insist on using HiSilicon chips.

In terms of process resources, Huawei's huge investment and status helped HiSilicon obtain TSMC's 16nm process, which has great benefits for performance and power consumption.

HiSilicon lived up to its mission and had a huge breakthrough in 2014, developing high-version 4G baseband chips and SOC, which are things that the technologically powerful NVIDIA, Intel and Samsung have not yet achieved.

With the growth in sales of Huawei mobile phones, HiSilicon is also doing better and better, and is now the leading chip manufacturer in China.

Rockchip just entered the mobile phone market a few days ago, but with Intel behind it, which has subsidized it with US$7 billion over the past two years, it should not be underestimated.

Future competition

Judging from the current situation, the two giants, Qualcomm and MTK, have a comprehensive layout in the high, medium and low-end markets, leaving little market space.

China's chips have no technical advantage over the two giants. To compete, we must rely on comprehensive strength.

Judging from the technical level alone, Spreadtrum cannot compete, Unigroup has retreated to the ultra-low end, HiSilicon can barely compete, and Rockchip can fight in the low end, but none of them have an advantage.

However, the situation is completely different when combined with the upstream and downstream industrial chains. HiSilicon has the support of Huawei, Unigroup may get purchases from Xiaomi, and although Rockchip is a newcomer, it has had many years of cooperative relationships with many tablet manufacturers. As long as there is a solution, a large number of tablet phones will appear, and Rockchip is not weak at all.

The weakest Spreadtrum has a "pie in the sky". The acquisition by Tsinghua Unigroup and rumors of state support are enough to support Spreadtrum for several years .

In other words, although Chinese mobile phone "core" technology has no advantages, they have no big problems in survival. Although Qualcomm and MTK are powerful, Chinese "cores" still have room for survival. In addition, due to the fierce competition in the smartphone industry, Chinese mobile phone manufacturers have the intention to integrate the upstream industry chain. These Chinese "cores" are all treasures. Therefore, they have no pressure to merge further, and they still live their own lives and continue to develop.

In recent decades, Chinese enterprises have gradually occupied the manufacturing industry, starting from the clothing industry, to toys, small commodities, home appliances, PCs, and mobile phones. In the chip industry, the rise of Made in China is only a matter of time. Although Qualcomm and MTK are now aggressive, as long as the technical threshold is broken, the world will eventually belong to Chinese enterprises.

This article is printed from OFweek China High-tech Industry Portal