The use of Huawei Technologies’ Kirin 5-nanometer chip in a new laptop has triggered a new round of online debate about whether the US-sanctioned firm has achieved new technological breakthroughs or just used some inventory made in Taiwan.
A similar debate was seen when Huawei unveiled the Kirin 9000s chip, a 7nm chip used in its Mate60 Pro phone, in late August. Technology experts later found that the processor was made by the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) with its N+2 process via deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography.
The newly launched Qingyun L540 laptop uses a Kirin chip called 9006C, according to Huawei’s website. The chipset has an octa-core ARM central processing unit, including four A77 and four A55 cores with a maximum clock speed of 3.13GHz.
It’s unclear whether this processor was made in China or is simply a modified Kirin 9000 chip made by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) three years ago.
But in any case, Washington is going to strengthen its curbs against Huawei’s chip-making plan.
On Monday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Bloomberg News in an interview that the US will take the “strongest action possible” in response to Huawei’s launch of the Kirin 9000s chip.
Raimondo said the Commerce Department is deeply concerned by the launch of the Kirin 9000s chip and has been vigorously investigating into it.
She said the US is also looking into the specifics of three new artificial-intelligence (AI) accelerator chips that Nvidia Corp is developing for China.
On Wednesday, Thea Kendler, an assistant secretary of commerce for export administration at the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), told a House Foreign Affairs Committee oversight panel that the Joe Biden administration shares the lawmakers’ concerns about Huawei’s technological capacities.
However, Kendler said the United States’ export controls are meaningful in slowing China’s advanced technology acquisition. She said the Kirin 9000s’ production scale and performance cannot meet the market demand.
“Neither the performance nor yields may match the market of the device,” Kendler said. “Moreover, the semiconductor chip that is inside that phone is a poorer performance than what they had years ago.”
L420 laptop
Before TSMC was banned by the US from making Kirin chips in mid-September 2020, it had produced the Kirin 9000 chips for Huawei. Some of these chips were made into the Kirin 9000E for use in Huawei’s Mate40 in 2020.
Some Chinese media said TSMC could have shipped about 30 million units of the Kirin 9000 chips in its last shipment to mainland China.
In late 2021, some of these chips were made into the 9006C chips and used in Huawei’s L420 laptops. Most analysts believed that Huawei had already run out of its Kirin 9000 chips over the past two years, given that the Mate50 smartphone launched in September 2022 did not use any Kirin 9000E chip.
Anton Shilov, a writer at Tom’s Hardware, says SMIC may have broken the 5nm process barrier by successfully making the Kirin 9006C chips with its N+2 process.
He says it does not make a lot of sense for Huawei to have kept a large quantity of premium processors for three years. He says the Kirin 9000 has a built-in 5G modem and can be used to make a high-end smartphone rather than an inexpensive laptop.
Some netizens believe that the 9006C chip is only inventory.
A netizen called “Teortaxes” says in a social media post that, even if Huawei can make 5nm chips, it does not necessarily need to replicate a chip identical to the old Kirin 9000E as such a move is not economical.
Until now, Huawei has not yet commented on when and where its Kirin 9006C chips were manufactured.
N+2 process
In October 2020, Semiconductor Manufacturing South China Corp (SMSC), a SMIC subsidiary, successfully used its FinFET N+1 process to make 10nm chips, which were said to be equivalent to 7nm chips in performance.
SMIC chief executive Liang Mong-song said at the time that the company was developing N+2 chips, which can be used in high-energy processors.
In late August, the Kirin 9000s chip was launched. It was made with the N+2 process that relies on multiple exposures, which can significantly increase the production cost.
Theoretically, DUV lithography can make 5nm chips with more exposures but then the cost will be too high for mass production.
In 2021, Liang admitted that there is no way for China to mass produce 5nm or smaller chips without obtaining an extreme ultraviolat (EUV) lithography from ASML in the Netherlands.
He said China should put its feet on the ground and strengthen its foundation of making 14-28nm chips before focusing on smaller chips. He has not made new comments on the matter since then.
Read: Raimondo calls out Nvidia for China shipments
Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3.
Seems every time China takes a step forward, the American government thinks its’ pants are on fire. One day an actual expert in chip technology will examine this chip and determine how it was fabricated.
Why does the US think technology has to be only from them? ..