The First Financial Times reported that Huawei’s chip business unit, in collaboration with domestic EDA enterprises, has created a batch of domestically produced EDA tools, which have all been replaced with domestically produced EDA tools for processes above 14 nanometers. This breaks the US plan to use EDA tools to curb the development of Chinese chips.
According to a report by China First Financial Times, at the Spark Award Expert Symposium on Huawei’s “Problem List”, the founder of Huawei emphasized that they had completed the replacement development of 13000 devices in the past three years, making significant progress in chip localization. Subsequently, Huawei’s rotating chairman, Xu Zhijun, pointed out that Huawei HiSilicon has further expanded the process of chip development and localization.
Xu Zhijun pointed out that Huawei Hisense actively seeks to replace 78 domestic development tools around hardware development, chip development, and other aspects. One of them is EDA, which is an important tool for chip development. Chip design companies use EDA tools to develop chip design drawings. After the design drawings are handed over to chip foundries, the chip foundries use the same EDA tools to explain and hand over to lithography machines and other equipment, Only in this way can chips be produced.
Previously, global EDA tools were mainly provided by the United States, with the three major EDA companies, Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics, accounting for nearly 80% of the global EDA market share. The United States was attempting to rely on the monopoly advantage of EDA tools to restrict American EDA companies from providing relevant EDA software to China and curb the development of Chinese chips.
Nowadays, Huawei has fully adopted domestic EDA tools to replace American EDA, proving that domestic EDA tools have sufficient strength to meet the needs of chip design, highlighting the rapid development of domestic EDA tools; Moreover, this is not only the widespread adoption of domestic EDA tools by chip design companies, but also driving chip manufacturing companies to adopt domestic EDA tools. According to industry insiders, Samsung and TSMC have both adopted Chinese EDA tool software on a large scale, indicating that Chinese EDA tools are beginning to go global.
EDA tools are just a microcosm of the breakthroughs made by Chinese chips, and in recent years, China has quickly taken corresponding measures to respond to every measure taken by the United States. The United States has restricted the supply of RF chips, analog chips, and GPU chips from the United States to China, and China has quickly developed corresponding chips to replace them with domestically produced chips.
The United States has attracted Japan and the Netherlands to restrict the supply of chip equipment and materials such as lithography machines and photoresists to China. The Chinese chip equipment industry has actively promoted the replacement of domestic lithography machines and photoresists. It is said that in the eight major links of chip manufacturing, domestic chips have broken through to 14 nanometers in seven links, and etching machines and photoresists have both advanced to 5 nanometers. Although lithography machines still face difficulties, they are expected to progress to 28 nanometers or even 14 nanometers within one or two years.
Nowadays, with the addition of EDA tools, the domestic chip industry chain has basically formed a complete chip industry chain. Among many global economies, China should be the only one with a complete chip industry chain, achieving autonomy in chip design and manufacturing, highlighting the solid foundation of China’s chip industry.
It can be said that the practices of the United States in recent years have stimulated the enormous potential of the Chinese chip industry. The Chinese chip industry has worked together to leverage their respective advantages and form a joint force, ultimately creating a perfect industry chain today. Due to the development of China’s industrial chain, the US chip industry has made different choices. NVIDIA, Xinsi Technology, Fanlin Group, and others have customized chip products for China to bypass US restrictions and ensure revenue from the Chinese market.
American billionaire Bill Gates has repeatedly emphasized that the US approach cannot stop China from developing powerful chips, and the achievements made by Chinese chips now confirm this point; With the development of Chinese chips, American chips have suffered huge losses. Intel and Micron have fallen into losses, and many American chip companies have seen their revenue decline, resulting in a loss of $1.8 trillion in market value in 2022. It can be said that the United States is really throwing a stone at its own feet.https://www.stoneitech.com/