In late August 2023, Huawei quietly-not-so-quietly started selling its own phone chips again.
Without much fanfare, the Huawei Mate 60 Pro went on sale in its online store. And what
everyone's talking about is the phone's SOC: the Kirin 9000s (麒麟9000s), a 7-nanometer class chip.
Huawei didn't say who made this SOC,
but it is most likely our old friend SMIC. The whole thing has turned into a real kerfuffle.
In this video we are going to talk about the Mate 60 Pro and its Kirin 9000s.
## Another Note
A note before we start, this is a current event.
More news will break, and that news may invalidate what I will have to say in this video. I talked to
a few people for their thoughts but the only information I have is what everyone else has.
Again like last time, I am not interested in "American Failure" doomers, China triumphalism,
or any other general nastiness. I want to remind you. One day we are back. The next day it's over.
I also want to politely remind you that 7 nanometers, 5 nanometers,
and other such labels have no bearing on the transistors' actual sizes.
These are marketing names assigned to classes of chips. The transistors are not actually
7 nanometers apart. The name signals a class of performance. Okay that’s that.
And finally, please be civil in the comments. If you are angry,
take a deep breath, and go do something else. Life is too short.
Now that we have acknowledged all of this … again … let us break this down together.
## The Phone and the Chip
The Mate Pro 60 is a very nice phone.
According to TechInsights, the Kirin 9000s is a 107 square millimeter die.
This is about 2% larger than Kirin 9000 and
Kirin 9000E - which were the last leading edge chips Huawei shipped.
That chip was briefly produced using TSMC's 5 nanometer process
until American sanctions ended that association.
This new 7 nanometer class chip is about 5-6 years behind the leading edge. TSMC has been shipping
3-nanometer class chips throughout this year in preparation for the September iPhone 15 launch.
Teardowns and speed tests imply that the Kirin 9000s supports 5G connectivity. However,
Huawei seems like they are trying to hide that.
In a recent press release mentioning the phone,
they did not bring up 5G support. And the phone OS itself reports 4G on the surface.
I am curious why Huawei seems to be hiding the 5G functionality. We know
Apple has been trying to ninja their way around Qualcomm's modem patents for a very long time.
If I were Qualcomm, I would give this phone to my best patent lawyers.
The SoC’s CPU core is a customization on top of Arm IP. The GPU appears to be
a new custom design done by Huawei or HiSilicon.
The new design caused weird texture errors when playing popular games
like Genshin Impact. Those of course will be fixed in time.
Everyone is talking about the yields and indeed that's the big
thing we all want to know. Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis wrote that
SMIC’s early yields with this node are likely to be far higher than we expect.
Yields always start low, but ramp up as the fab improves. TSMC scaled N7's
yields far enough to supply an iPhone launch. The
same for SMIC. The more phones Huawei sells, the faster that will happen.
All in all, we know very little about this chip. Very little has been released and I
suspect that that is more a feature than a bug. We will probably learn more later but let me
be clear. This 7nm chip is real and the node that made it looks to be really, really good.
## Why Are We Surprised?
The first thing that I thought when I first heard about this was: Why are we all so surprised?
In the last video I did on this, I said that we should not be surprised
to see a Hisilicon chip coming with this 7nm SMIC N+2 process node.
I should have been more clear in the video that Hisilicon is Huawei.
So I was saying that we should expect a 7nm chip for a Huawei phone soon.
Furthermore, early last month, Nikkei Asia mentioned offhandedly
that SMIC was working with Huawei on a new 5G chip. Now it is here.
We first heard news of the SMIC N+2 process in July 2022. At the time,
the process node was being used for a Bitcoin miner.
This makes sense to me because Bitcoin miners have repetitive
structures so they are good use cases for improving the node.
A phone SOC like the Kirin 9000s on the other hand is a far more complicated chip
to produce. The fact that they have been able to do it and do it so well shows the tremendous
progress that Co-CEO Liang Mong-song and SMIC have been able to produce in just about a year.
## More Chips are Coming
Second thing, we should not be surprised to see even more advanced chips coming.
In January 2022, legendary TSMC R&D director Dr. Burn Lin - the father of 193 nanometer
immersion lithography and a colleague of Liang Mong-song - said in an interview that
SMIC can fab even 5 nanometer-class chips with only multi-patterning.
Immersion lithography is the key technology here. It is maybe 1-2 decades old but they
still are perhaps the best lithography machines in the world. They matter more than we think.
The United States banned EUV lithography exports, but that was perhaps a red herring. I have been
thinking recently about slowing EUV lithography insertion. Perhaps EUV as we know it today lacks
the throughput, power, and cost requirements to be competitive for full utilization.
In such a case, 193-nanometer immersion machines like the Twinscan NXT 2000i and
higher will still do 70-80% of the litho work for Intel,
TSMC, and Samsung in their latest nodes. Perhaps even for the foreseeable future.
The administration stopped short of a 193i ban at the time apparently because they
felt that Japan and the Netherlands would not come along. It was not until June 30,
2023 - a year later - that the Netherlands and Japan finally
joined together with the United States to impose these export restrictions.
And ASML was definitely unhappy about it. They are trying to sell all the DUV
immersion machines they can before the end of the year.
What this means is that SMIC still has plenty of these machines to ramp
up 7 nanometer production and make the move for 5. Keeping in mind that these
machines do break down, need spare parts, maintenance, sanctions can expand, etc.
Ergo, I fully expect a 5-nanometer class Huawei chip coming down the line - probably in 1-2
years. No doubt that they already have it specced out in some Huawei/SMIC lab.
And when that news breaks, I will probably have to make this exact same video again.
## A China-Only Supply Line is Emerging
This Mate 60 phone is more than just a great, high-performing chip.
It is also ensconced within an ecosystem of domestic Chinese suppliers and they
have come together to create a phone that is feature-parity with the market.
Bloomberg mentioned the phone's many domestic suppliers. This includes the radio frequency
front-end module and the satellite communications modem for the phone's satellite calls feature.
With the exception of the memory which seems to have come from SK Hynix -
oh whoops how did THAT happen?? - the whole phone is basically a China-only ecosystem.
The pieces are set for a complete, self-contained ecosystem within the
People's Republic of China to produce all sorts of domestic electronics - smartphone SOCs,
CPUs, edge AI NPUs, GPUs ... and AI accelerators. And therein lies the rub.
## AI is the Next Big Move
At the end of it, a phone chip on par with something
released five years ago is not a huge deal.
Well, it is probably going to be a huge deal for Qualcomm, Apple,
and MediaTek. Ming-chi Kuo posted that Qualcomm sells tens of millions of chips for Huawei phones.
These sales are likely to be replaced by the
new Kirin 9000s and others like it. And as Dylan notes,
every non-Chinese semiconductor maker and Apple will lose business to this new domestic chip.
SMIC will probably be busy fulfilling Huawei orders for the next year or so. But if I were
them I would be immediately looking to find new N+2 node customers in high powered computing.
A partner to make a domestic AI accelerator - a Chinese
version of the Nvidia A100 or TPU, so to say.
So I fully expect to hear news of a Chinese 7 nanometer AI accelerator coming in 1-2 years.
Perhaps designed by Biren, Baidu, Alibaba Cloud or Tencent. Unless sanctions intervene.
## What China Does Next
Now what should China do next?
The Chinese are building up their native semiconductor and technology ecosystem
and it is real. Their work deserves praise, especially after being so hard hit by sanctions.
The main goal - from a semiconductor manufacturing perspective - should
be widely distribute this phone to as many people as possible. Scale means everything.
Millions of units are being sold right now, but we need millions more. They need
to be selling this phone and its chips not only to Chinese domestic consumers
but also to Europeans, Australians, Southeast Asians, and Latin Americans.
This might be challenging since Huawei phones don't ship with
Google products. But Huawei has been doing a lot of influencer marketing,
trying to get the word out to people on how to put Google products back on Huawei phones.
Every export sale not only is a loss for Western phone makers, but also strengthens SMIC. The more
chips sold, the more chips SMIC makes. The more chips they make, the faster they can raise yield
and achieve profitability. And with that, they can more quickly fund their move to 5 nanometers.
Also, SMIC should start reviewing and replicating
the advanced packaging technology stack. In the packaging world,
phone chips emphasize thinness and heat. So they use thinner things like Chip Scale Packaging.
But if we want to get to what is next - which is advanced AI - then there
are other things to consider like data bandwidth. These require new
packaging architectures like chiplets and 2.5D die-stacking. Again, not impossible for them.
The Chinese Government will also need to shore up their domestic
semiconductor manufacturing equipment ecosystem. That means replacing ASML,
Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, Lam Research, and all the metrology guys.
Every piece of foreign equipment probably has a kill switch back
home. I am pretty sure that ASML does. So better start writing those checks.
## What America Does Next
Now how should the United States respond?
For more, I’m bringing in guest correspondent and US-China tech
relations expert Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk. I’m a longtime fan of his
work and I think you’d all enjoy his popular podcast and youtube channel
In the rollout to the October 7th restrictions, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and
Security laid out the justification for cutting off foreign support for “advanced semiconductors,
defined as logic ICs at 16/14nm or below or using non-planar transistor architecture.”
> “The restrictions implemented in this rule follow extensive United States
government consideration of the impact of advanced computing ICs,
“supercomputers,” and semiconductor manufacturing equipment on enabling military modernization,
including the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and human rights abuses."
Translation: the US government has intelligence that makes clear
that China getting the ability to manufacture advanced logic chips
has significant implications for the regional military balance of power.
Given the progress SMIC and Huawei have made, on the current trajectory if the
US government believes that a Chinese 7 nanometer node remains an eventual
threat to its national security ... well then they might try a little harder to stop it.
This requires a better understanding of what semiconductor manufacturing
equipment is still coming through. SMIC depends on foreign equipment
for this node. Domestic suppliers remain years behind - no matter the propaganda.
Today, equipment companies like Applied, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron and KLA are able to
sell pretty much their entire suite of tools. Most tools for deposition,
etch, metrology, epitaxy and so on used for 7nm and even 5nm can also plausibly be used in 28nm.
These tools are being sold to the likes of SMIC ostensibly for use at lagging edge
nodes though they are almost certainly being repurposed to make chips like the Kirin 9000s.
It’s not too late to ensure that China isn’t able to develop leading edge capacity at
scale. The US government, in cooperation with allies in Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany,
should consider tighter export controls that target the tools currently being repurposed,
like Argon Fluoride Immersion lithography, mask, and CMP equipment,
as well as far less liberal use of licenses to firms like SMIC on the entity list.
Thanks Jordan for your thoughts.
## Conclusion
In my video about Korean semiconductors, I mention that in 1986,
Samsung shocked the Japanese with their 1 megabit DRAM chip, closing
the Korean-Japanese semiconductor gap from 5 years to just one.
Two years later in 1988, Samsung then brings out their 4 megabit chip - pulling them to
parity with the Japanese. Japan from there on began to crumble.
The Kirin 9000s is like that. A visible mark on technology history. A shock in
the ecosystem that ripples far beyond this small semiconductor neighborhood.
The People's Republic of China is taking the Korean approach to semiconductor
manufacturing. It worked for South Korea. It is working for China too. So now what?