The mystery behind the Kirin 9000s chipset used to power the Huawei Mate 60 Pro could have been solved by X tipster
@RGcloudS. To refresh your memory, when Huawei surprise-introduced the Mate 60 Pro in late August, everyone was stunned when a teardown revealed that the phone was powered by a Kirin 9000s chipset designed by Huawei and built by the largest Chinese foundry, SMIC, using its 7nm node. US lawmakers and officials have called for tougher sanctions against Huawei.
In 2020, the
United States expanded its export rules to prevent foundries using American technology to make chips from shipping cutting-edge silicon to Huawei without a license. The last two flagship series offered by Huawei before the Mate 60
Pro, Mate 50 and P60 series were powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset modified to work on 4G signals. In other words, the only way to connect to a 5G signal with these phones was to purchase a special third-party case.
But the Mate 60 Pro offers 5G connectivity as a native feature for the first time since 2020 thanks to the Kirin 9000s chip. Analysts question how Huawei could circumvent sanctions and how SMIC could produce such a chip without access to an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine. This machine etches extremely fine circuit patterns onto silicon wafers to enable the placement of billions of transistors. The only company that makes the EUV machine, ASML, is a Dutch company that has blocked shipments of one of its products to China.
Tipster X, on his tweet, showed a screenshot that lists the Kirin 9000 as a 5nm chip. One of the photos from the Mate 60 Pro teardown showed that the Kirin 9000s had a timestamp of 2035, meaning that this specific chip was manufactured in the 35th week of 2020 or between August 24 and 30, 2020. So in other words, @RGcloudS believes that the Kirin 9000 is a rebranded 5nm Kirin 9000. As the tipster writes, “the Kirin 9000 is actually a Kirin 9000 manufactured by TSMC 3 years ago and not by SMIC.” The Kirin 9000 was the first 5nm chip designed for a smartphone when it launched in 2020.
Using some back-of-the-envelope calculations, @RGcloudS estimates that Huawei could have stockpiled 142 million Kirin 9000E and Kirin 9000 5G chipsets over a three-month period. He adds that it is not possible for Huawei to target sales of 40 million units of the Mate 60 Pro range if it counted on the production of the SMIC N+2 7nm process node, whose yield was less than 20%. He also adds: “No matter how talented you are, you can’t produce 7nm with the old DUV machine from 1980, several stacking steps to create compared to EUV.”
Keep in mind that this is just one person’s opinion on what happened. Also keep in mind that the 2020 Kirin 9000 contained 15.3 billion transistors, very close to the A16 Bionic’s 16 billion but 24.2% fewer than the A17 Pro’s 19 billion.
