The Chinese company Huawei Technologies, which demonstrates serious ambitions in the world market, has long been tried by the US authorities to press with the help of political tools. She became one of the main victims of the "trade war" between the US and China. In order to avoid further harassment in the development and production of processors, Huawei is ready to cooperate with the European STMicroelectronics.
Huawei's management has already stated recently that it is ready to look for alternative options for the production of processors if their release by TSMC is limited by the will of the US authorities. Edition citing informed sources, reports that in conditions of increased secrecy, Huawei has been cooperating with STMicroelectronics since last year in the field of creating mobile processors and components for automotive electronics.
I must say that the Italian-French STMicroelectronics abandoned special ambitions in the segment of processors for smartphones back in 2013, when the ST-Ericsson joint venture ceased to exist. But STMicro supplies various sensors for smartphones and automotive systems in huge quantities, Tesla and BMW are among its customers in the automotive direction.
The alliance with the European manufacturer will allow Huawei not only to get another source of processors for smartphones, but also to strengthen its position in the segment of automotive electronic systems, which are becoming more sophisticated and eventually poised to replace the person behind the wheel. And the first jointly developed mobile processor could find its way into smartphones from the Honor brand, which accounts for more than a quarter of Huawei's product sales.
STMicro has its own manufacturing facilities in Singapore, France and Italy. They don't use state-of-the-art processes, but that's a bit of an advantage, as it will help protect partners from attacks by the US government in the event of tightening export control laws. STMicro produces only a part of the products on its own, the rest of the products are manufactured by TSMC and other contractors on its order. Huawei has been one of STMicro's top ten customers before, so deepening cooperation would be a logical continuation of previous collaboration. Representatives of both companies have so far refused to comment on rumors about the development of new Huawei processors and the intentions of the Chinese giant to gain a foothold in the automotive components market.
Source: 3dnews.ru