Mystery solved as report tells us which chip powers Huawei's Mate 70 series
Early reports said that the premium variants of Huawei's new flagship Mate 70 series were equipped with a Kirin 9100 application processor (AP) built by SMIC using a 6nm process node. Since China's largest foundry (and the third largest in the world after TSMC and Samsung Foundry) is limited to using older Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV), it was assumed that SMIC used multiple patterning (aka multiple exposure) to create the thinner circuitry patterns on silicon wafers that would be needed for the foundry to take its chip production to the next level.
But after a teardown of the Mate 70 Pro+ by semiconductor analysis firm TechInsights, the latter announced today that the SoC it found inside the premium Huawei flagship was not the 6nm Kirin 9100 after all; it was the 7nm Kirin 9020. The chipset is similar to the 7nm Kirin 9010 AP employed by Huawei on last year's Mate 60 Pro. So the truth is that SMIC did not deliver more advanced 6nm or 5nm chipsets to Huawei for its second 2024 flagship line.
TechInsights did say that it spotted changes to the circuit floor plan on the Kirin 9020 that enhances the new chip's performance and efficiency. The die of the Kirin 9020 is 15% larger than the size of the Kirin 9010.
"The Kirin 9020 processor is not a dramatic redesign but rather an incremental improvement over its predecessor, the Kirin 9010. This approach suggests HiSilicon's focus on refining its existing designs while leveraging SMIC's capabilities in advanced semiconductor manufacturing,"-TechInsights
TechInsight's discovery shows that Huawei and SMIC are having a hard time being able to follow up on last year's shocking introduction of the Mate 60 series which was powered by a Kirin chip supporting 5G for the first time since 2020's Mate 40 line. The U.S. changed its export rules in 2020 so that foundries that use American equipment to produce chips were banned from shipping advanced silicon to Huawei.
The Huawei Mate 70 Pro+ is powered by the 7nm Kirin 9020 according to TechInsights. | Image credit-Huawei
Qualcomm obtained a license allowing the San Diego-based chipmaker to ship Snapdragon APs to Huawei for the P50, Mate 50, and P60 flagship lines. Qualcomm was given that license by the U.S. Commerce Department because it tweaked the chips so they couldn't be used with 5G airwaves. The U.S. has been trying to keep advanced chips, including those that support 5G, out of the hands of China's military.
At the same time, the U.S. and Dutch governments have prevented Chinese firms from obtaining the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography machines required by foundries to manufacture chipsets using a 6nm node and lower. To put it simply, a lower process node typically means that smaller transistors are being used. That allows a chip to have a higher transistor count (the number of transistors inside a chip) and a higher transistor density (the number of transistors packed into a specific area of a chip). The higher a chip's transistor count, usually the more powerful and efficient that chip is.
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