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China's telecommunications giant Huawei is planning to restart designing mobile phone chips, circumventing export controls, said Nikkei.
www.eenewseurope.com
Huawei plans to use SMIC’s ‘nearly-7nm’ process
Business news | July 31, 2023
By Peter Clarke
China’s telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies is planning to restart designing mobile phone chips, circumventing export controls, according to Nikkei.
Huawei was a leading smartphone vendor – rivalling Apple and Samsung – as well the market leader in 5G communications equipment. However, export controls imposed by the US, restricted Huawei’s access to leading-edge chips and China’s access to chipmaking equipment.
Huawei’s lack of access to foundry TSMC forced the company to cease producing its own chips and phones in 2020. But now the company is working with leading Chinese foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC) to put a 5G mobile chipset into mass production in the coming months, Nikkei said.
SMIC has been manufacturing FinFETs at 14nm but this is not sufficiently small to produce leading-edge mobile phone chips. The foundry has been denied access to extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment but has managed to produce its so-called ‘N+1’ process which is reported to be close to an equivalent to TSMC’s 7nm (see SMIC process is 7nm, says Tech Insights).
While it may be possible for Huawei to design to the SMIC process what remains unclear is whether the manufacturing yield can be brought up to economic levels.
At the same time the Chinese government is pursuing a policy of self-sufficiency and therefore is important for SMIC’s process development to have commercial products to fill the wafer fab.
Very unlikely. The latest mobile chips are on the N4 process and soon will be on the N3 process. Cell phones with chips on the N+1 process would not be competitive and not able to charge premium prices. (Check the current prices of cell phones use Snapdragon 865 (tsmc N7))
Head of YMTC delivers a keynote speech at Semicon China.
www.tomshardware.com
And can Huawei even design 5G SOC? IIRC older ones were just sub 6GHz.
Does anyone even have any reliable informations? I mean media are notoriously unreliable here (or at least consistent) and chinese "security laws" probably does not allow leaking this type of info.
This seems to indicate YMTC was indeed fairly aggressive in purchasing the most advanced equipment. SMIC didn't make the same request publicly, maybe they had to keep the appearance they were some generations behind; their website only goes to 28nm (previously 14nm).
The 2022 7nm demo by SMIC almost certainly made use of the NXT:2000i (started shipping in 2018), which is now forbidden. How those machines are being handled now would be quite interesting.
www.eenewseurope.com
