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