The development of 5G technology is still on-going and it has currently gone past the stage of using an external baseband. Although Qualcomm will be the first to integrate the 5G baseband on its coming Snapdragon flagship SoC (maybe SD865?) in this quarter, this processor will not be commercially available until the first half of next year. From the latest developments, Huawei is also accelerating the pace of launching a 5G baseband SoC and we are expecting the Kirin 985 in Q3 2019.
Gizchina News of the week
According to recent reports, Huawei Mate 30 will be equipped with a Kirin 985 chip, based on TSMC’s 7nm+ process, and the FC-PoP technology package of ASE. This whole process has been successfully trial-produced and mass production is scheduled for the third quarter of this year. However, Kirin 985 is still a 4G baseband at the chip level. To support 5G, it still needs to adopt the external Balong 5000 5G baseband.
According to the report, Huawei’s new SoC developed after Kirin 985 will directly integrate the 5G baseband, which is expected to come out early next year, and the supported frequency bands also cover high-frequency millimeter waves. From the perspective of progress and strength, Qualcomm and Huawei are expected to become the top 2 players in the 5G SoC field. As for MediaTek, it is expected that the first 5G mobile phone supporting the Sub 6GHz band will be launched at the end of this year.
