The Evolution of Huawei HiSilicon: From ASIC Design Center to Kirin SoC

In 1991 Huawei created its own ASIC design centre to develop application‑specific integrated circuits, marking the start of a long‑term IC design effort.

At that time Huawei was only four years old, with a few dozen employees and severe cash constraints, yet it persisted despite near‑bankruptcy.

The ASIC centre produced Huawei's first digital ASIC in 1993 and later achieved 100k‑gate, 1M‑gate and 10M‑gate ASICs in 1996, 2000 and 2003 respectively.

By October 2004, with sales of RMB 46.2 billion and a workforce of tens of thousands, Huawei spun off Shenzhen HiSilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd., commonly known as Huawei HiSilicon.

HiSilicon’s English name, HI‑SILICON, is an abbreviation of HUAWEI‑SILICON; “silicon” is the key material for semiconductor chips.

HiSilicon is a wholly‑owned subsidiary of Huawei, often described as “Huawei is HiSilicon, HiSilicon is Huawei”.

Because HiSilicon does not list on a stock exchange, many details remain opaque, giving the company a mysterious reputation.

The most recognizable HiSilicon product is the Kirin mobile processor series, used in Huawei flagship phones such as the P20 with the Kirin 970 chip.

HiSilicon’s solutions span digital home, communications and wireless terminals, covering smartphones, network equipment, and digital‑home devices.

In the security‑camera market HiSilicon holds about 90 % global share after more than a decade of development.

HiSilicon also supplies high‑end router chips; in November 2013 it released a 400 G backbone router (NE5000E‑X16A) powered by the HiSilicon SD58XX chip, predating comparable Cisco products.

HiSilicon’s first market‑available mobile processor was the K3 in 2009, aimed at the clone‑phone market and ultimately unsuccessful.

Stimulated by Apple’s A4 success in 2010, HiSilicon launched the K3V2 in 2012, which powered flagship devices such as Mate 1 and P6 but suffered from high power consumption and poor compatibility.

In late 2013 HiSilicon released its first SoC, the Kirin 910, featuring a 1.6 GHz quad‑core Cortex‑A9 CPU, Mali‑450 GPU and the in‑house Balong 710 baseband.

SoC (System‑on‑Chip) integrates the application processor (AP), baseband processor (BP), GPU, power‑management and other components into a single chip.

Subsequent Kirin generations (925, 960, 970, etc.) were progressively adopted in Huawei’s flagship phones, establishing a strategy of tightly coupling Kirin chips with Huawei devices.

Owning its own chips gives Huawei lower R&D and manufacturing costs, stronger bargaining power, and more reliable supply.

HiSilicon is a fabless semiconductor design company; after design it relies on TSMC for manufacturing.

In the semiconductor industry companies are classified as IDM (integrated design & manufacture, e.g., Intel), Fabless (design only, e.g., ARM, Qualcomm, HiSilicon) or Foundry (manufacturing only, e.g., TSMC).

In 2017 HiSilicon ranked 7th among global fabless firms with $4.715 billion revenue, behind Qualcomm.

HiSilicon licenses ARM IP for its designs; ARM sells IP and collects royalties, allowing many companies to build on its architecture.

While HiSilicon initially lacked the ability to heavily modify ARM’s “bare‑bones” designs, its growing expertise suggests it may acquire such capabilities in the future.

Overall, Huawei’s decision to create HiSilicon and pursue self‑designed chips has proven strategically sound, though the path remains long and demanding.