Blockbuster report says SMIC will build 5nm chips for Huawei this year

Blockbuster report says SMIC will build 5nm chips for Huawei this year،

When Huawei introduced the Mate 60 series last August, it stunned the world and upset U.S. officials. Indeed, the range was powered by Huawei's first 5G Kirin chipset since 2020's Mate 40 series. That was the year the United States changed its export rules to prevent any foundries using American technology to produce chips to ship cutting-edge silicon to Huawei.

Before the introduction of the Mate 60 series, Huawei was licensed to use special versions of Qualcomm's Snapdragon application processors for the flagship P50, Mate 50 and P60 models. These chipsets have been modified to prevent them from working with 5G signals.

The Kirin 9000S, the 5G chipset used with the Mate 60 line, was manufactured by China's largest foundry, SMIC. Without access to an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, it was unclear whether SMIC could produce a 7nm chip suitable for a smartphone, much less a flagship model, using the deep ultraviolet lithography machines it needed. has access. Lithography machines etch circuit patterns onto silicon wafers, and EUV machines create the extremely fine patterns needed to accommodate the billions and billions of transistors found on cutting-edge chips made using the 7nm node and less.

7nm Kirin 9000S 5G chip powers Huawei Mate 60 lineup

According to two sources cited by the Financial Times (via Tom's material), SMIC has successfully created 5nm chips using deep ultraviolet lithography and Huawei's HiSilicon semiconductor unit will be the foundry's first customer for its 5nm components. As a result, Huawei could potentially be on track to seriously improve its smartphone performance this year, as it gets closer to the 3nm A17 Pro SoC that Apple currently uses to power the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, as well as Snapdragon 8 Gen 4nm. 3 and Dimensity 9300 designed by Qualcomm and MediaTek respectively.

SMIC is expected to produce two chips for Huawei this year. One is the aforementioned new Kirin SoC for Huawei's handsets, and the other is the Ascend 920 chip used for AI applications. But all is not going well. SMIC's 7nm yield is reportedly less than a third of TSMC's foundry yield, while SMIC charges 40-50% more than TSMC for chips produced using the 5nm and 7nm nodes.

While Huawei was once TSMC's second-largest customer after Apple, the company cannot obtain the license from the United States it would need for the foundry to make its chips. So, Huawei is stuck with the minimum wage.

Chips made using lower process nodes can be equipped with smaller transistors, thereby increasing the transistor count of those chips. And the more transistors a chip contains, the more powerful and/or energy efficient that chip is. For example, the 2019 iPhone 11 series featured the 7nm A13 Bionic which contained 8.5 billion transistors. The 3nm A17 Pro, powering the iPhone 15 Pro series, contains 19 billion transistors.