The U.S. supply chain ban has forced Huawei to expand usage of its Kirin chips

Huawei might have used its own Kirin SoCs and MediaTek’s chips on more of its phones during the 2019 third quarter because it is banned from accessing its U.S. supply chain. The company was placed on the U.S. Commerce Department’s entity list in the middle of May due to security reasons. As a result, the manufacturer has not been able to purchase chips from Qualcomm, which is headquartered in San Diego, California. Huawei did say that it had built up a large inventory of certain components anticipating a U.S. ban. The company that provides Huawei with memory chips, Micron Technology, says that it has received a license for 2020 allowing it to ship its DRAM chips to Huawei, which is Micron’s largest customer.

Samsung is making a different kind of shift with its first flagship of 2020, the Galaxy S20 series. Traditionally, Samsung used its most powerful Exynos chip on the Galaxy S series in most markets except for the U.S., Japan, China, and Latin America. The units shipped in those countries were typically powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. But this year, all Galaxy S20 models will be equipped with the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform except for units shipped in Europe; the latter phones will employ the Exynos 990 SoC.

Qualcomm remains the leader in delivering chipsets globally to the mobile wireless market with a 31% market share. MediaTek is next with a 21% slice of the global pie. Samsung’s Exynos and Huawei’s Kirin own 16% and 14% of the global mobile chip market respectively.

Speaking of Qualcomm, it had originally planned on having Samsung manufacture its new flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, using its 7nm EUV process. Instead, it appears that TSMC will produce the chipset using its improved 7nm “N7P” process; this is the very same node used by TSMC to manufacture Apple’s highly regarded A13 Bionic chipset. Halway through this year, TSMC will start shipping 5nm chips which will contain more densely packed transistors making these ICs more powerful and energy efficient than currently available chips. Two of the first major SoCs to be produced by TSMC using the 5nm process are expected to be Apple’s A14 Bionic and Huawei’s Kirin 1020. We should see these components inside the 2020 iPhone models and the Huawei Mate 40 series respectively.