You keep wanting to commingle and muddle the discussion of how many chips are produced at the newest node vs. total phones.
The claim by many is that SMIC cannot supply Huawei's smartphone demand. At this point the US government cut licenses of Qualcomm 4G chipsets to them, right after Huawei had switched its entire phone lineup to use SMIC produced chips. So at this point you can expect all their smartphones to use SMIC chips.
Huawei has a disparate portfolio of handsets with several kinds of chipsets. But so do other phone companies.
As I told you today they hold a larger market share in China than Apple. This was thanks to the SMIC chips.
The success of the Mate 70 with their HarmonyOS NEXT is a big question mark. But if they pull it off they will have a vertically integrated platform from the chips to the OS.
My main point is that Huawei has a major supply chain issue for their most advanced chips, especially when you compare vs. their competitors that leverage Apple, MediaTech and Qualcomm chips. And Huawei could only pre-stock 1M 9100's, the most "advanced" node.
This is pure conjecture. Since Huawei never publicly revealed how many smartphones they pre-stocked.
And like I said I admit as much that SMIC cannot supply as many wafers of their leading edge node as TSMC can. Regardless of yield they just do not presently have the capacity.
The yields you often see claimed in the press for the SMIC 7nm process are also clearly a pack of lies. Since even the most cursory examination of the numbers would show the yield should be reasonably high. I explained this here in another thread. If the yields were as low as they claim they would not be able to deliver the smartphones they did. And it is not like they are the only client for the SMIC FinFET fab.
The chip Huawei's latest phone will use is presently unknown. As is the process.
Bottom line is that SMIC is sub-scale for even staying close to the leading edge, even without the other impediments (no EUV, needing excess multi-patterning).
Subscale compared with whom? At this point SMIC can produce more FinFET wafers than GlobalFoundries at a denser node. Samsung's latest process is a disaster. Intel lacks capacity in their leading edge node as well. And neither of them are being sanctioned.
The HiSilicon Kirin 9010 chips which came out were competitive against Qualcomm's thanks to good design more than the process being that high performance to begin with. And now that Huawei make their own OS they have another lever they can pull to keep competitive with their product other than semi process. This buys Huawei time for the foundry and semi tools industry in China to figure something out and improve the process further.
In a way the US government sanctioning their use of Android was a panacea. This made them go for making their own proprietary OS. Huawei has a cult following in China as it is. And we know how long such kinds of platforms can survive even with obsolete hardware. Apple survived for years with obsolete PowerPC chips before switching to Intel.
Suggesting that they have far poorer yields precisely because they are sub-scale at their "leading edge" that has far more mask steps than competitors outside of China.
Except when SMIC started mass production of the smartphone chips they had already been producing smaller chips for like a couple of years already in that process. We simply do not know the yield the process started out with while making the smartphone chips, but I suspect it was not as low as some people claim, I suspect it was at least 70%. And should be higher today.
It will be interesting to see if Huawei has skimped on the chips inside the base Mate 70's. From what I have heard, the Mate 70 Pros are very impressive phones, but extremely costly to make and very limited in quantity.
If it is true that they increased the transistor density again this would likely have come at extra manufacturing cost with either more or more complex mask steps. So yes it would be likely that they would try to charge a premium for those chips. SMIC's existing N+2 process was already claimed to have similar logic density as Intel 7 or TSMC N7P.
