US officials and lawmakers may have lost it with the announcement of the Mate 60, which sports the new Kirin 9000s and has 5G support, but China has not had its last word. According to the new information, China is investing a lot of money in semiconductor development technologies and telling the US “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.
The Kirin 9000s is built on 7nm at China’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, SMIC. Used older DUV technology to etch patterns on silicon wafers, with some modifications. HUAWEI and SMIC can with DUV machines, SMIC can print semiconductors at 7nm, but to reach 5nm and 3nm, they need EUV machines. The lower the nm goes, the more transistors fit on a chip, which means better performance and better energy behavior. The problem with China is that only one company makes EUV machines, ASML, which follows US pressure and does not export to China. Now, according to Digi Times, SMIC has created a new R&D team, which aims to create 3nm chips, using the DUV equipment it already has.
This is almost impossible to do, as the patterns to be drawn are thinner than a human hair. But SMIC has a hidden ace up its sleeve. This is the company’s co-CEO, Liang Mong-Song, a distinguished semiconductor scientist. He has worked at TSMC and Samsung in the past and is considered a luminary in the semiconductor industry. SMIC has DUV machines, specifically ASML’s Twinscan NXT:2000i. SMIC is reportedly using triple, quadruple, and even quintuple patterning in an effort to reach 3nm without an EUV lithography machine.
We have no guarantee that SMIC will succeed, but the right person as the head of the team so that it has the best chance. On the other hand, in 2025, TSMC and Samsung are preparing lithography at 2nm, which will be even more difficult for SMIC to achieve, but in this time it may be able to develop its own way of lithography. After all, the government of China is investing astronomical sums in the development of semiconductors, so the possibilities are not few.
Price Guarantee and cashback on airfare with Google Flights Of course, the US restrictions are aimed at hurting HUAWEI and so far they have not managed to bring the company to its knees, which has received a huge blow but remains alive. Every time the US imposes new conditions to restrict HUAWEI, the company finds ways to slip away. Of course, the huge funds available to it also play a big role, something the CEO of the company told us in an interview given to him by Techmaniacs in 2020 in Barcelona. If we think about the course of the company since it entered the Entity List of the USA, it is really impressive what it has achieved.
It couldn’t access Android, build Harmony OS, building all the APIs from scratch to make it work, completely replacing Google Mobile Services. Now with the Mate 60 Pro, it brings back 5G to its devices, with a fairly powerful chip, but which cannot compete with the proposals from Samsung and Apple in terms of performance. This is what the company is working on, in order to create more modern chipsets, to arm itself with performance and new features. In 2019, before the US restrictions, HUAWEI sold 240.6 million devices, moving closer to the title of the leading smartphone manufacturer. When the ban started, the company had 188.5 million devices in reserve, with Google Services, which made them available on the market. With the sale of Honor as well, HUAWEI lost 81% of its sales, reaching only 35 million devices in 2021. Now the company is working feverishly to restore it and has a target of 100 million devices by 2024.
If HUAWEI and SMIC manage to create 3nm chips, then the US will gain serious competition in the creation of chipsets and the whole situation will turn boomerang for them. After all, the US has pushed China to the brink so that it can get into the process of creating its own chipsets. It remains to be seen whether the SMIC brain will succeed.
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