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rick.merritt
FYI, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Juniper all design their own silicon ...
MHK_#1
What HiSilicon (or Huawei) want to do can be possible to achieve as a short-term ...
Inside Huawei’s HiSilicon
Rick Merritt
5/18/2011 2:20 PM EDT
In a small white office building tucked between the world headquarters of Intel and Nvidia, a team of engineers is heading up one of the most ambitious and controversial microprocessor designs in Silicon Valley. When announced sometime next year, the chip aims to be as fast and powerful as anything driving the world's largest Internet routers.
Huawei Technologies, one of China's most successful electronics companies to date, is designing the chip for its own systems.
The Shenzhen-based networking giant has gathered a global team of semiconductor veterans along with the best of China's electronic engineering graduates working in its chip division, HiSilicon Technologies. The chip unit was launched in 1991, and emerged as a full division under the HiSilicon name in October 2004. To date, it has completed more than 120 chip designs and claims to have shipped 150 million chips.
The router chip is perhaps the most sophisticated and ambitious project in the brief history of the secretive HiSilicon group. EE Times Confidential tracked down the ex-Cisco microprocessor architect heading the HiSilicon router chip design team. His is a story that a growing number of U.S. engineers are experiencing as they sign on with Chinese electronics companies.
Click here to read the full story in the May edition of EE Times Confidential.
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Neo1
5/18/2011 10:08 PM EDT
A little confusing, are they doing custom cpus for networking or making chips with branded cpus? There have been too many companies trying to come up with a cpu design of their own but seldom with enough justification to why they need it.
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KB3001
5/19/2011 6:55 AM EDT
I guess these are custom ASICs for front-end data capture and processing.
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Android
5/19/2011 3:22 AM EDT
To know more about reasons for custom cpu design, please visit - http://www.tensilica.com/products/literature-docs/white-papers/10_reasons.htm
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tato76
5/19/2011 5:38 AM EDT
Custom chip design is not limited to CPU especially in the telecom equipment market. For example Huaweii is known for its custom Signal Processing chips for optical receivers instead of depending on the optical suppliers like Core Optics or JDSU. Having a chip division with excelent engineers makes all the sense in this industry.
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GREAT-Terry
5/19/2011 12:19 PM EDT
Just like Apple, it may be to have full control on the core technology, including CPU, OS. For Huawei, having its own network processor may be a very important strategy to be ahead of its competitors.
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elctrnx_lyf
5/21/2011 12:53 PM EDT
Huawei will soon become number one mobile networking and normal networking equipments.
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MHK_#1
5/22/2011 4:53 AM EDT
What HiSilicon (or Huawei) want to do can be possible to achieve as a short-term goal, because they have a money and manpower to do it, if they want to own their unique from OS to hardware. Many of companies in a history tried to do that. I know from a history that won’t last long.
As a unit’s complexity is getting bigger, it is not possible to do that alone. As money moves to other area, they will abandon as most, if not all, of other companies did. I will step aside and watch how far they can push further.
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rick.merritt
5/23/2011 10:28 AM EDT
FYI, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Juniper all design their own silicon for high end routers in Silicon Valley. Huawei is the latest to join this elite crowd. And HiSilicon does many, many other chips exclusively for use in its own wired and and wireless comms systems.
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