HiSilicons

HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd., commonly known as HiSilicon, is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company owned by Huawei Technologies. It was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong. HiSilicon designs integrated circuits used in Huawei devices and in some other products, operating as Huawei's in-house chip design arm.

It develops system-on-chip families for mobile, servers, and artificial intelligence, including the Kirin smartphone application processors, the Kunpeng server processors, the Ascend AI accelerators, and Balong modem chips used in 4G and 5G devices. Notable mobile Kirin chips include several generations released for Huawei smartphones, such as the Kirin 970, 980, 990, and the 9000 flagship introduced in 2020.

HiSilicon is a fabless company, outsourcing fabrication to external foundries. Its most prominent manufacturing partner has been Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produced Kirin 9000 on a 5-nanometer process; older generations used other nodes. The company has also relied on domestic foundries for certain products as manufacturing strategies evolved.

Since 2019-2020, U.S. export controls have restricted Huawei’s access to certain technology and equipment, affecting HiSilicon's ability to design and source components for advanced chips. As a result, the development and deployment of new flagship Kirin mobile processors have slowed, and HiSil Silicon's external partnerships and product roadmap have faced constraints. Despite these pressures, HiSilicon remains Huawei's primary in-house chip design organization and continues to provide components for Huawei devices and related products, as well as AI and networking silicon.