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发帖数: 2394 | 1 Industry Voices—Madden: Huawei's inventory bubble soon may burst
by Joe Madden | Aug 7, 2019 10:00am
Huawei MWC19
By May 2019, Huawei had an inventory equivalent to 100,000 additional base
stations using 64T64R MIMO. (Fierce Wireless)
Joe Madden
Somehow, executives at Huawei knew in advance that the U.S. government would
be coming after them. During late 2018, Huawei started ramping up their
purchasing of key semiconductors for their 5G base station platform. By May
2019, the company had shipped at least 30,000 base stations and had
inventory equivalent to 100,000 additional base stations using 64T64R MIMO.
Yes, that’s a pile of 20 million amplifiers and millions of FPGAs. It’s a
commitment of at least $400 million for "extra" inventory, in addition to
their immediate production requirements. (If you are interested in the
detailed semiconductor forecast, click here.)
This is a remarkable contrast with the ZTE situation last year. When ZTE was
cut off from American semiconductors, they were shut down almost
immediately.
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Today, Huawei is shipping 5G base stations using their pile of inventory,
and we estimate that they have about four months of runway left before the
plane must fly on its own. They’re scrambling with “Platform C”
implementation, which is a variation on their 5G base station design without
any American components.
Nobody outside of Huawei’s lab has seen a prototype of “Platform C,” but
we have some estimates of performance based on component level benchmarks:
The integration of ASIC and ADC/DAC is a key part of making 64T64R work
without excessive heat. In the short term, a return to a HiSilicon ASIC
without ADC/DAC integration would result in a very hot radio head.
If HiSilicon integrates the ADC/DAC technology that they have access to, we
believe that they’ll have difficulty with EVM and spurious emissions
requirements.
The ARM core is an important part of the HiSilicon product line, and takes
care of some key functions in the radio head design at low power. Can Huawei
either use the ARM core without a license, or somehow duplicate the ARM
core’s function in their own design? We don’t see a straightforward answer.
Other components such as power amplifiers, filters, and fiberoptic
transceivers should be available from Japan and Europe, so the list of truly
critical devices has become shorter.
At a political level, it’s important for the U.S. government to understand
that Huawei is not feeling the pressure in the base station market today.
They can keep running for a few more months… and then the noose will
tighten.
Even when Huawei runs out of inventory of Xilinx RFSoCs, we believe that
they will be able to produce base stations for the domestic Chinese market.
The “Platform C” base station is likely to be klunky, with fans on the
radio head and poor EVM/linearity performance. But, they are selling most of
their 5G base stations to friendly customers in China! So we expect Huawei
to get government waivers for compliance issues, and customer waivers for
ugly fans and other workarounds.
The problem for Huawei will be in their overseas 5G sales. Will Huawei be
able to sell 5G base stations with crappy performance in Germany or Denmark?
No way. That’s where this game will get really interesting. | Z**********L
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