The US government has spent the last several years restricting China's access to US-based technologies, which has caused no end of headaches for firms like Huawei that need cutting-edge silicon. US regulators were stunned several weeks ago when China's SMIC began mass-producing 7nm ARM processors, and now it has apparently moved on to 5nm. Again, regulators have been caught off guard by this advancement in China's chip manufacturing.
Huawei debuted the Mate 60 smartphone this fall, which was the first device to sport one of the new 7nm processors. The Kirin 9000S can't stand up to the latest chips from Qualcomm or MediaTek, but it's still a much more advanced design than anyone expected SMIC to manufacture with the hardware at its disposal.
The Kirin 9000S wasn't just a statement—it was the first in a line of sanction-defying chips. Huawei has already announced the availability of a new 5nm chip, the Kirin 9006C. This processor has eight ARM CPU cores (four A77 and four A55) with a maximum clock speed of 3.13GHz. Huawei says it offers "higher performance, lower power consumption, and faster processing speeds." This essentially puts Huawei back where it was in 2020. That's when it debuted the original Kirin 9000, which was manufactured by TSMC.
Before the current escalation of tensions, TSMC supplied most of China's high-end chip needs—Huawei was just its largest Chinese customer. Even though TSMC is in Taiwan, it relies on US technology and must comply with Washington's export controls. The Chinese government responded to the technology embargo by refocusing on domestic chip manufacturing, but the US hamstrung China even further in 2022 when it restricted the sale of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, leaving China with access to less advanced deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) tech.
The Kirin 9006C is currently only available in Huawei's Qingyun L540 laptop, but there's no reason it couldn't come to more devices later. And Huawei doesn't own SMIC—the foundry could produce chips for other Chinese companies that can't get by with older designs.
Despite these advances, China's tech sector isn't out of the woods yet. Using the DUV hardware to fabricate chips at 5nm is reportedly a complex and expensive process, and even this hardware won't be available indefinitely. The US recently pressured the Dutch government to accelerate plans to halt lithography sales to China. As a result, Netherlands-based ASML will only be permitted to sell its market-leading DUV machines to China until the end of 2023. It's unclear when China will be able to advance to 3nm chips, but it'll be hard to stop.
