Private company

HiSilicon

HiSilicon (Chinese: 海思; pinyin: Hǎisī) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Shenzhen, Guangdong province and wholly owned by Huawei.1

Last updated Oct 18, 2026.

Overview

2004Founded1

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HiSilicon (Chinese: 海思; pinyin: Hǎisī) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Shenzhen, Guangdong province and wholly owned by Huawei. HiSilicon purchases licenses for CPU designs from ARM Holdings, including the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore, ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore, ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Cortex-A57 and also for their Mali graphics cores. HiSilicon has also purchased licenses from Vivante Corporation for their GC4000 graphics core.2

How it started

History

HiSilicon was Huawei's ASIC design center, which was founded in 1991.

2004– Shenzhen HiSilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd. was registered and the company was formally established.

2016– HiSilicon's Kirin 960 chipset was rated one of the "best of Android 2016" in performance by Android Authority.

2019– Shanghai HiSilicon, a wholly owned subsidiary of Huawei, was established.

2025– First HiSilicon 7nm N+2 Kirin X90 series PC class in-house ARM-powered chips launched for MateBook Pro, MateBook Fold and MatePad Edge HarmonyOS powered computers following Intel and Qualcomm chip May 2024 bans.

From Wikipedia’s article on HiSilicon, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Timeline

  1. 2004Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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