HiSilicon is reputed to be the largest domestic designer of integrated circuits in China.[6] In 2020, the United States instituted rules that require any American firms providing equipment to HiSilicon or non-American firms who use American technologies or IPR (such as TSMC) that supply HiSilicon to have licenses[7] as part of the ongoing trade dispute, and Huawei announced it will stop producing its Kirin chipsets from 15 September 2020 onwards[8] due to this disruption of its supply chain. On 29 August 2023, Huawei announced the first fully domestically fabricated chip, the Kirin 9000S, which is used on its latest Mate 60 Pro phablet series of phones and MatePad 13.2 tablets.
History
HiSilicon was Huawei's ASIC design center, which was founded in 1991.[9]
2004– Shenzhen HiSilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd. was registered and the company was formally established.
2016– HiSilicon's Kirin 960 chipset was rated one of the "best of Android 2016" in performance by Android Authority.[10]
2019– Shanghai HiSilicon, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huawei, was established.[11]
Smartphone application processors
HiSilicon develops SoCs based on the 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[12] 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.[13] 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.
HiSilicon Kirin 8000 is a mid-range Kirin 8 series chip not officially announced, however, it was released along with the announcement of Huawei nova 12.[19]
Kirin 9000 is HiSilicon's first SoC based on 5 nm+ FinFET (EUV) TSMC technology (N5 node) and the first 5 nm SoC to be launched on the international market.[33] This octa-core system on a chip is based on the 9th Gen of the HiSilicon Kirin series and is equipped with 15.3 billion transistors in a 1+3+4 core 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) The Kirin 9000L uses a 1+2+3 core configuration: 3 Arm Cortex-A77 (1x 3.13 GHz and 2x 2.54 GHz), 3 Arm Cortex-A55 (3x 2.05 GHz) and a 22-core Mali-G78 GPU with Kirin Gaming+ 3.0 implementation.[33]
The integrated quad pipeline NPU (Dual Big Core + 1 Tiny Core configuration) is equipped with the 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/L). 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 5G proprietary modem "Balong 5000", Kirin 9000 supports 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G SA & NSA Sub-6 GHz connectivity.[33] The SoC's 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. The Kirin 9006C is a rebranded variant of the Kirin 9000E for the Huawei Qingyun L420 and L540 laptops.[34][35]
The Kirin 9000S, Kirin 9000S1, and Kirin 9010 of the Kirin 9000 Hi36A0 family are the first HiSilicon-developed SoCs manufactured in high volumes in mainland China by SMIC. The SoC had its debut with the Huawei Mate 60 in late 2023 with the Kirin 9000S alongside overclocked enhancements of the Kirin 9000S1 and Kirin 9010 with the Huawei Pura 70 series in early 2024.[36] According to Tom's Hardware, the Taishan V120 core, developed by HiSilicon, was roughly on par with AMD's Zen 3 cores from late 2020.[37] Four of these cores were used in the 9000 series alongside four efficiency-focused Arm Cortex-A510 cores.[38] The SoCs are based on SMIC's 7nm technology node, referred to as "N+2". It also includes 1 Da Vinci "big" NPU core and 1 Da Vinci "small" NPU core. Kirin 9000W, a Wi-Fi only SoC for the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 Wi-Fi only model, debuted in global markets in Q1 2024. The Kirin 9010 and Kirin 9000S1 debuted in Q2 2024, using a modified 2+6+4 core configuration with a new large Taishan core with the same configurations of medium and small cores from the Kirin 9000S with faster enhancements over the Kirin 9000S.[39]
HiSilicon develops smartphone modems which are primarily used in its parent company Huawei's handheld and tablet devices.
Balong 700
The Balong 700 supports LTE TDD/FDD.[43] Its specs:
3GPP R8 protocol
LTE TDD and FDD
4x2/2x2 SU-MIMO
Balong 710
At MWC 2012, HiSilicon released the Balong 710.[44] 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: 84 Mbit/s downlink and 23 Mbit/s uplink.
Balong 720
The Balong 720 supports LTE Cat6 with 300 Mbit/s peak download rate.[43] 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.[43] 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.[45] 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).[43] 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.[46] The modem has an advanced 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G connectivity.[47] Its specs:
The Balong 6000 is an iteration of the HiSilicon Balong 5G baseband series and first appeared in the Huawei Mate 70 Pro, launched on Novemer 26, 2024.
It‘s one of the first 3GPP Rel. 18 and therefore 5.5G/5G-Advanced supporting modem in the world alongside the Qualcomm Snapdragon X75/X80 and onwards series.[49]
HiSilicon develops SoCs for wearables such as wireless earbuds, wireless headphones, neckband earbuds, smart speakers, smart eyewear, and smartwatches.[51]
Kirin A1
The Kirin A1 (Hi1132) was announced on 6 September 2019.[51] It features:
The Hi1612 is HiSilicon's second generation server processor launched in 2016. It is the first chiplet-based Kunpeng with two computing dies. 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.[55][56][57][58] It features:
The Kunpeng 920 (formerly known as Hi1620) is HiSilicon's fourth generation server processor announced in 2018, and launched in 2019. Huawei claims the Kunpeng 920 CPU scores more than an estimated 930 on SPECint_rate_base2006.[59] 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.[60][61][62] It features:
32 to 64x custom TaiShan V110 cores at up to 2.6 GHz.[63]
The TaiShan V110 core is a 4-way superscalar, out-of-order microarchitecture 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 the dot product and FP16 FML extensions.[63]
The TaiShan V110 cores are likely a new core not based on ARM designs[64][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:
80 custom TaishanV120 cores at 3 GHz frequency, with support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and ARM's Scalable Vector Extension (SVE).[63]
Each Da Vinci Max AI Core features a 3D Cube Tensor Computing Engine (4096 FP16 MACs + 8192 INT8 MACs), a vector unit (2048bit INT8/FP16/FP32), and a 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).[32]
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.[65] The Ascend 310 features:
^Hinum, Klaus (12 October 2018). "ARM Mali-G76 MP10". Notebookcheck. Archived from the original on 4 December 2018. Retrieved 3 December 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
^"Kirin". www.hisilicon.com. Archived from the original on 2 October 2019. Retrieved 21 September 2019.