Huawei's Breakthrough 7nm Chips Projected At 50% Yield: Report
According to a Nikkei report, Huawei has ambitious plans to resume high-end mobile system-on-a-chip production starting this year. This story confirms an earlier Reuters report that Huawei plans to use SMIC's 7nm manufacturing technology for its return to smartphone SoCs. However, according to reports, Huawei will face a problem: the high density of defects in 7nm SMIC class nodes.
"However, the throughput [quality] results for the 7nm node are quite low, expected to be around 50%, and there is still much room for improvement," Donny Teng, an analyst at Nomura Securities, said in a comment. Nikkei. “Affordable chips and commercially available chips are two different things. It's still worth keeping an eye on how they perform, but we understand that Huawei is willing to invest heavily in this area to bring back the chips."
Modern mobile SoCs contain billions of transistors and are quite large. For example, the Apple A16 Bionic has 16 billion transistors and operates at a frequency of up to 3.46 GHz. In the past, Huawei has competed with Apple and Samsung with their flagship smartphones and produced really high quality SoCs. We don't know what Huawei will do at the time of this writing, but we're sure the company wants to make something that's quite competitive with competitors' high-end smartphones.
SMIC has never officially announced its 7nm class of technology, but it could be the N+1 process, which was developed as a low-cost alternative to TSMC's N7 and has been in production since at least early 2021. As a general rule, nodes designed for cheap chips are not designed for building large-chip SoCs. But SoCs for smartphones are relatively large with billions of transistors, so building them with N+1 can be challenging.
Of course, SMIC and Huawei may develop new nodes optimized for high performance mobile SoCs, and while the failure density may now be too high for target applications, both companies will work to reduce it and improve performance results.
Huawei and SMIC have been blacklisted by the US government since 2020. While Huawei doesn't have access to processing technology from TSMC or Samsung foundries, SMIC can't get its hands on extraordinary equipment sophisticated enough to manufacture chips on the 14nm process. Without permission from the US government. But SMIC still has a team good enough to build chips in the 5nm class process, and while they may be more expensive than competing processors made by TSMC using EUV equipment, they still get the job done.
If Huawei can redesign its mobile chips, it will be a significant win for China. Over the years, the country has invested heavily in building a comprehensive national chip industry, but SMIC has barely made it into 7nm and 5nm class nodes and will not be able to build EUV equipment to develop more advanced manufacturing technology. Also, the ability to produce 14nm and 7nm class chips without access to modern DUV equipment is questionable.
Meanwhile, most of SMIC's sales are still in 40nm and older chips, so sanctions imposed by the US, Japan and the Netherlands have little impact on SMIC's financial situation.
