Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) newest laptop runs on a chip made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a teardown of the device showed, quashing talk of another Chinese technological breakthrough.
The Qingyun L540 notebook contains a 5-nanometer chip made by the Taiwanese company in 2020, about the time US sanctions cut off Huawei’s access to the chipmaker, research firm TechInsights found after dismantling the device for Bloomberg News.
That counters speculation that Huawei’s domestic chipmaking partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), might have achieved a major leap in fabrication technique.
Photo: AP
Huawei caused a stir in the US and China in August when it released a smartphone with a 7-nanometer processor made by Shanghai-based SMIC.
A teardown by the Canada-based research outfit for Bloomberg News showed the Mate 60 Pro’s chip was only a few years behind the cutting edge, a feat that US trade curbs were meant to prevent. That revelation spurred celebration across the Chinese tech scene, and a debate in the US about the effectiveness of sanctions.
In the latest teardown, TechInsights discovered a Kirin 9006C processor fabricated via TSMC’s 5-nanometer method, which was assembled and packaged in late 2020.
Industry experts had previously speculated that SMIC achieved that milestone by developing workarounds to US sanctions, which would have marked a second technological triumph for the Chinese national champion in just a few months.
The advances encapsulated in the Mate 60 smartphone last year cemented Huawei’s role as the standard-bearer for Chinese efforts to wean itself off Western technologies and create domestic alternatives.
Chinese consumers snapped up the smartphone in the final quarter, helping the company regain the symbolically important US$100 billion revenue threshold — eroding Apple Inc’s iPhone dominance along the way.
A foray into 5-nanometer territory would have represented a big leap for the Shenzhen conglomerate, bringing it closer to the most advanced processes currently in use, mostly centered at about 3-nanometer nodes. Before TSMC cut off ties with Huawei, it was supplying chips as advanced as 5-nanometers to the Chinese firm.
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