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Synopsys stops vital chip design updates to Huawei

By Cookie Monster - on 3 Jun 2019, 4:00am

Synopsys stops vital chip design updates to Huawei

Software updates provided by Synopsys are essential for Huawei to develop future chip designs.

Huawei's future chip design efforts suffer yet another blow as Synopsys stopped providing software updates and put new intellectual property (IP) sales on hold. 

Synopsys, the world's biggest supplier of chip design tools, informed employees to suspend the software updates and sales of new IP to comply with the U.S Commerce Department's regulations. Without the software updates and new IP, Huawei's in-house chip development programs and 5G ambitions would be threatened.

"It would become very difficult for Huawei to design new chips if they could not have new updates of software, given that the whole chip production process has become so sophisticated and complicated," a chip industry executive familiar with the matter told the Nikkei Asian Review. "There may be updates every week to help chip developers synchronize with chip manufacturers and solve bugs."

Without those updates, the design process would face endless problems, and chip manufacturers could become reluctant to put those designs into mass production, this person told Nikkei.

"It's like designing those chips in the dark," another industry manager said. "That could take a lot longer and even result in failures."

Huawei has reportedly completed the designs for the upcoming Kirin 985/990 chipsets and Balong 5000 5G modem chips. However, chip development for 2020 and beyond is likely to be affected. In addition, Huawei also lost access to ARM's chip architecture designs which form the foundation of the former's smartphone chip designs. 

Source: Nikkei Asian Review

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