China major AI chipmakers maintain partnerships with TSMC

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Jan. 02, 2018, Jan. 02, 2018 – 

China's major AI chipmakers, including HiSilicon, Cambricon Technologies, Horizon Robotics and DeePhi Tech, are expected to reap rich harvests in 2018 from their launch of various AI (artificial intelligence) chipsets, mostly ASICs and NPU (neural processing unit) chips, for a variety of applications in the second half of 2017. They have all contracted Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for chip fabrication, and TSMC's orders for AI chip foundry services are expected to grow exponentially in 2018 along with volume shipments of the AI chips by the China makers, according to industry sources.

Huawei's HiSilicon chip design arm worked out the Kirin 970 as the new flagship SoCwith built-in AI computing capabilities and it was adopted in Huawei's Mate 10 and M10 Pro smartphone models launched in mid-October 2017. Official production of the Kirin 970 chips kicked off in mid-2017 using TSMC's 10nm FinFET process at a monthly capacity of 4,000 pieces of 12-inch wafers, placing Huawei among TSMC's top-5 customers.

Huawei, having newly formed a strategic alliance with Baidu SkyDrive, will move to seek further breakthroughs in the capabilities of AI chips for smartphones. While aiming to capture a 40% share of the China smartphone market and advance to the world's No. 1 smartphone brand, Huawei requires stable and sufficient supply of AI chips and even has to seek second supply sources other than TSMC, the sources said.

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