US set to avert Huawei from getting 5nm chips with further restrictions after the Mate 60 Pro

Remember the Huawei Mate 60 Pro? Yeah, if you don't, let me assure you that there is no shortage of US officials who can't remove the memory from the Mate 60 Pro and I bet they have night sweats. After all, the Mate 60 Pro wasn't supposed to be in light of all the US sanctions against China and Huawei, however, this has come to fruition in 2023. Now the US is targeting China's largest chip manufacturing plant after Huawei Mate 60 Proreports Reuters.

The Biden administration is turning up the pressure on the most sanctioned Chinese chipmaker – SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp). US authorities are set to block SMIC's most advanced factory from receiving more US imports. Indeed, SMIC produced a sophisticated chip for Huawei's Mate 60 Pro, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

This aligns with recent revelations that China's SMIC is set to produce a 5nm chipset for Huawei's upcoming smartphones. This 5nm Kirin chipset could, at least in theory, result in serious performance for Huawei phones in 2024, 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, and 4nm. Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Dimensity 9300 chipsets designed by Qualcomm and MediaTek respectively.

“Dozens of letters”

After the Mate 60 Pro's bombastic unveiling, the Commerce Department reportedly sent dozens of letters to SMIC's U.S. suppliers, suspending permission to sell U.S. high-tech products to SMIC's most advanced factory, people said. two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

While many companies had already stopped selling to SMIC South, as the unit is called, the letters halted shipments worth millions of dollars of chipmaking materials and parts from at least one supplier, Entegris, one of the sources said. The Reuters report explicitly states that it found “no evidence that Entegris violated any U.S. laws or regulations.”

Entegris said it made the shipments following a valid export license and halted them after receiving letters from the Commerce Ministry suspending authorization to send products to SMIC Sud.

Entegris produces the building blocks for chip manufacturing: filters, gases, chemicals and products for wafer handling, said it monitors and complies with “rapidly evolving regulatory requirements” for international trade affecting the chip industry.