HiSilicon is reputed to be the largest domestic designer of integrated circuits in China.[6] In 2020, the U.S. instituted rules that require American firms providing certain equipment to HiSilicon or non-American firms who use American technologies that supply HiSilicon to have licenses[7] and Huawei announced it will stop producing its Kirin chipset from 15 September 2020, onwards.[8] HiSilicon has since been overtaken by Chinese rival UNISOC in terms of mobile processor market share.[9]
Branch
HiSilicon (Shanghai) Technologies CO., Ltd
HiSilicon (Shanghai) Technologies CO., Ltd is a fabless semiconductor and IC design company.[10]
HiSilicon Technologies Co Ltd
HiSilicon Technologies Co. Ltd. manufactures semiconductor products. The Company designs, develops, produces, and provides network monitoring chips, video-phone chips, and other chips for wireless networks, fixed networks, and digital media fields.[11]
History
Shenzhen HiSilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd. was Huawei's ASIC Design Center, which was founded in 1991.
2004– Shenzhen HiSilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd. was registered and the company was formally established.
2016– Kirin960 designed by HiSilicon was awarded as one of "best of Android 2016" by Android Authority.[12]
2019– Shanghai HiSilicon, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huawei was established.[13]
Smartphone application processors
HiSilicon Hi6250
HiSilicon develops SoCs based on ARM architecture. Though not exclusive, these SoCs see preliminary use in handheld and tablet devices of its parent company Huawei.
K3V2
The first well known product of HiSilicon is the K3V2 used in Huawei Ascend D Quad XL (U9510) smartphones[14] and Huawei MediaPad 10 FHD7 tablets. This chipset is based on the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore fabbed at 40 nm and uses a 16 core Vivante GC4000 GPU.[15]
The SoC supports LPDDR2-1066, but actual products are found with LPDDR-900 instead for lower power consumption.
This is a revised version of K3V2 SoC with improved support of Intel baseband.
The SoC supports LPDDR2-1066, but actual products are found with LPDDR-900 instead for lower power consumption.
Kirin 9000 is HiSilicon's first SoC based on 5 nm+ FinFET (EUV) TSMC technology and the first 5 nm SoC to be launched on the international market.[34]
This octa-core eight threads system on a chip is based on the 9th Gen of the HiSilicon Kirin series and is equipped with 15.3 billion of transistors in a 1+3+4 configuration: 4 Arm Cortex-A77 CPU (1x 3,13 GHz and 3x 2,54 GHz), 4 Arm Cortex-A55 (4x 2,05 GHz) and a 24-core Mali-G78 GPU (22-core in the Kirin 9000E version) with Kirin Gaming+ 3.0 implementation.[34] The integrated quad pipeline NPU (Dual Big Core + 1 Tiny Core configuration) is equipped with a Kirin ISP 6.0 to support advanced computational photography. The Huawei Da Vinci Architecture 2.0 for AI supports 2x Ascend Lite + 1x Ascend Tiny (only 1 Lite in 9000E). The system cache is 8 MB and the SoC works with the new LPDDR5/4X memories (made by Samsung in the Huawei Mate 40 series). Due to the integrated 3rd generation 7 nm TSMC 5G proprietary modem "Balong 5000", Kirin 9000 supports 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G SA & NSA, Sub-6G and mmWave connectivity.[34] The SoC TDP is 6W.
The 2021 4G version of the Kirin 9000 has the Balong modem limited via software to comply with the ban imposed on Huawei by the US government for non-chinese 5G technologies.
HiSilicon develops smartphone modems which although not exclusively, these SoCs see preliminary use in handheld and tablet devices of its parent company Huawei.
Balong 700
The Balong 700 supports LTE TDD/FDD.[35] Its specs:
3GPP R8 protocol
LTE TDD and FDD
4x2/2x2 SU-MIMO
Balong 710
At MWC 2012 HiSilicon released the Balong 710.[36] It is a multi-mode chipset supporting 3GPP Release 9 and LTE Category 4 at GTI (Global TD-LTE Initiative). The Balong 710 was designed to be used with the K3V2 SoC. Its specs:
TD-LTE mode: up to 112 Mbit/s downlink and up to 30 Mbit/s uplink.
WCDMA Dual Carrier with MIMO: 84Mbit/s downlink and 23Mbit/s uplink.
Balong 720
The Balong 720 supports LTE Cat6 with 300 Mbit/s peak download rate.[35] Its specs:
TSMC 28 nm HPM process
TD-LTE Cat.6 standard
Dual-carrier aggregation for the 40 MHz bandwidth
5-mode LTE Cat6 Modem
Balong 750
The Balong 750 supports LTE Cat 12/13, and it is first to support 4CC CA and 3.5 GHz.[35] Its specs:
LTE Cat.12 and Cat.13 UL network standards
2CC (dual-carrier) data aggregation
4x4 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
TSMC 16 nm FinFET+ process
Balong 765
The Balong 765 supports 8×8 MIMO technology, LTE Cat.19 with downlink data-rate up to 1.6 Gbit/s in FDD network and up to 1.16 Gbit/s in the TD-LTE network.[37] Its specs:
3GPP Rel.14
LTE Cat.19 Peak data rate up to 1.6 Gbit/s
4CC CA + 4×4 MIMO/2CC CA + 8×8 MIMO
DL 256QAM
C-V2X
Balong 5G01
The Balong 5G01 supports the 3GPP standard for 5G with downlink speeds of up to 2.3 Gbit/s. It supports 5G across all frequency bands including sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave).[35] Its specs:
3GPP Release 15
Peak data rate up to 2.3 Gbit/s
Sub-6 GHz and mmWave
NSA/SA
DL 256QAM
Balong 5000
The Balong 5000 is the world's first 7 nm TSMC 5G multi-mode chipset (launched in Q1 2019), the world's first SA/NSA implementation and the first smartphone chipset to support the full NR TDD/FDD spectrum.[38] The modem have an advanced 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G connectivity.[39] Its specs:
HiSilicon develops SoCs for wearables such as truly wireless earbuds, wireless headphones, neckband earbuds, smart speakers, smart eyewear and smartwatches.[41]
Kirin A1
The Kirin A1 was announced on 6 September 2019.[41] It features:
The Kunpeng 916 (formerly known as Hi1616) is HiSilicon's third generation server processor launched in 2017. The Kunpeng 916 is used in Huawei's TaiShan 2280 Balanced Server, TaiShan 5280 Storage Server, TaiShan XR320 High-Density Server Node and TaiShan X6000 High-Density Server.[44][45][46][47] It features:
The Kunpeng 920 (formerly known as Hi1620) is HiSilicon's fourth generation server processor announced in 2018, launched in 2019. Huawei claim the Kunpeng 920 CPU scores more than an estimated 930 on SPECint_rate_base2006.[48] The Kunpeng 920 is used in Huawei's TaiShan 2280 V2 Balanced Server, TaiShan 5280 V2 Storage Server and TaiShan XA320 V2 High-Density Server Node.[49][50][51] It features:
32 to 64x custom TaiShan v110 cores at up to 2.6 GHz.[52]
The TaiShan v110 core is a 4-way out-of-order superscalar that implements the ARMv8.2-A ISA. Huawei reports the core supports almost all the ARMv8.4-A ISA features with a few exceptions, including dot product and the FP16 FML extension.[52]
The TaiShan v110 cores are likely a new core not based on ARM designs[53][original research?]
2-way and 4-way Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Each socket has 3x Hydra ports with 240 Gbit/s per port (total of 720 Gbit/s per each socket interconnects)
40 PCIe 4.0 with CCIX support, 4x USB 3.0, 2x SATA 3.0, 8x SAS 3.0 and 2x 100 Gigabit Ethernet
100 to 200 W
Compression engine (GZIP, LZS, LZ4) capable of up to 40 Git/s compress and 100 Gbit/s decompress
Crypto offload engine (for AES, DES, 3DES, SHA1/2, etc..) capable of throughputs up to 100 Gbit/s
Kunpeng 930 (formerly Hi1630)
The Kunpeng 930 (formerly known as Hi1630) is HiSilicon's fifth-generation server processor announced in 2019 and scheduled for launch in 2021. It features:
TBD custom cores with higher frequencies, support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and ARM's Scalable Vector Extension (SVE).[52]
Each Da Vinci Max AI Core features a 3D Cube Tensor Computing Engine (4096 FP16 MACs + 8192 INT8 MACs), Vector unit (2048bit INT8/FP16/FP32) and scalar unit. It includes a new AI framework called "MindSpore", a platform-as-a-service product called ModelArts, and a lower-level library called Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN).[33]
Ascend 310
The Ascend 310 is an AI inference SoC, it was codenamed Ascend-Mini. The Ascend 310 is capable of 16 TOPS@INT8 and 8 TOPS@FP16.[54] The Ascend 310 features:
1228 mm2 Total die size (456 mm2 Virtuvian AI SoC, 168 mm2 Nimbus V3 IO Die, 4x96 mm2 HBM2E, 2x110 mm2 Dummy Die)
32 MB on-chip buffer
128 channel video decode – H.264/H.265
TSMC 7+ nm EUV (N7+) process
350 W
The Ascend 910 Cluster has 1024–2048 Ascend 910 chips to reach 256–512 petaFLOPS@FP16. The Ascend 910 and Ascend Cluster will be available in Q2 2019.[55]
Similar platforms
The Kirin processors compete with products from several other companies, including:
