Huawei’s latest high-end smartphone uses a better chip made in China. This shows China is slowly making progress in advanced chips, even with U.S. limits.
The Kirin 9030 chip, which powers Huawei’s Mate 80 phones, is made by SMIC, China’s main chip maker. TechInsights, a Canadian research firm, says it uses an improved version of their 7-nanometer tech.
In a December 8 report, TechInsights said the Kirin 9030 uses SMIC’s N+3 process, a scaled extension of their older N+2 tech. This is a small step up from what SMIC could do before but still behind what big companies use.
TechInsights said that N+3 is still not as good as the 5-nanometer processes from TSMC and Samsung. Huawei and SMIC didn’t respond to requests for comments right away.
In October, China put TechInsights on its unreliable entity list. The company has released reports examining Huawei’s products and SMIC’s chip-making progress amid intensifying tech competition between China and the U.S.
The Mate 80’s chip shows how China is trying to make its own tech. The report made it clear that the gap between Chinese manufacturers and top chip producers is still wide. That continues to shape the world’s chip competition.
