On August 29th last month, Huawei unveiled the Huawei Mate 60 Pro, which is equipped with its own AP and GPU. As the Kirin 9000S, a self-developed processor, is reported to be a 7nm chip, foreign media recently reported concerns that China's semiconductor growth has not been curbed by U.S. sanctions.

According to recent reports from multiple foreign media outlets, including the Washington Post, with the release of Huawei's new smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro, Washington is concerned that the smartphone's proprietary mobile AP, which reflects advanced nodes and designs despite strict U.S. export controls, is being used.

In fact, some have evaluated that Huawei's new products, unveiled during U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Lamont's visit to China, caught the U.S. off guard.

According to IT media outlets including Toms Hardware, Huawei's new, mysterious 7nm chip, Kirin 9000S, is manufactured based on the second-generation 7nm process using the Twinscan NXT:2000i exposure equipment of Chinese foundry company SMIC, and although the details have not been disclosed, it is rumored that even 2.5D stacking technology has been applied.

Huawei has mass-produced a 7nm system-on-chip (SoC) using the design capabilities of its semiconductor design company, HiSilicon, and the DUV equipment owned by SMIC. SMIC has already supplied a system-on-chip for Bitcoin mining using the 7nm process since 2021.

According to testers, HiSilicon's Kirin 9000S is claimed to be the first mobile processor to feature hyper-threading, with 8 cores (1 core at 2.62GHz + 3 cores at 2.15GHz + 4 cores at 1.53GHz) and 12 threads.

The Kirin 9000S's benchmark performance was 1,323 points in single-core and 3,630 points in multi-core in Geekbench, which is similar to the performance of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888. Considering that the Snapdragon 888 is the flagship mobile AP in the first half of 2021, it can be simply calculated that China has a two-year gap in the advanced node competition.

Of course, it is not as optimistic as this. Not only has ASML not exported a single EUV to China, but it has also recently joined the US in strengthening export regulations, restricting even DUV. Accordingly, China is said to have secured as many DUV equipment as possible before September, when these restrictions begin.

However, securing a large number of DUV equipment to implement advanced nodes below 7nm is only a last resort. Industry experts unanimously agreed that “Chipmakers such as TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix have implemented 7nm-class processes by utilizing multiple patterning in DUV, but the reason that everyone has now moved to EUV in fine processes is because EUV is that effective.”

In order to perform fine processes below 7nm in DUV, a multi-patterning process is essential. In this case, the precision of the mask placement is required, and due to the complexity of the exposure process, such as the difficulty of performing accurate exposure when injecting the light source, there are major problems in yield and cost. Accordingly, there are rumors that the yield of SMIC's 7nm SoC is around 50% or lower.

In addition, experts predicted that the 5nm process would have a significant number of patterning defects due to the complexity of the process, such as theoretically requiring 100 mask alignments compared to the 7nm process.

The appearance of the Kirin 9000S appears to have narrowed the semiconductor gap in benchmarks to two years on the surface. However, in reality, it is assessed to be a desperate measure that has failed to secure advanced processes due to US semiconductor sanctions, and that it is difficult to secure next-generation product competitiveness, including yield and cost.