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The White House is seeking details on Huawei’s latest flagship smartphone, which analysts say is an important milestone for the Chinese tech group four years after U.S. restrictions crippled its phone business.
U.S. National Security Adviser Jack Sullivan said on Tuesday in response to a briefing question on whether the U.S. would impose controls on exports that the U.S. needed “more information” on the precise “characteristics and composition” of Huawei’s newly released Mate 60 Pro chip. The development of semiconductor technology is hindered.
While Huawei declined to disclose details of its Mate Pro suppliers, a teardown of the phone by consultancy TechInsights last week showed it uses a 7nm processor made by SMIC. SMIC did not immediately respond to Huawei’s request. Comment.
The partially state-owned Chinese chipmaker was hit with export restrictions three years ago when the U.S. Commerce Department said there was an “unacceptable risk” that chip technology would be diverted to “military end uses.”
SMIC reportedly began supplying advanced 7-nanometer miniaturized chips for bitcoin mining last year, a development that surprised the industry given the U.S. attempt to limit its use of the latest foreign chipmaking equipment.
SMIC’s 7-nanometer chips are the minimum required for smartphones and data centers to process data quickly, but still lag behind the 4-nanometer chips used in Apple’s current iPhone 14 series. Apple is widely expected to announce the use of 3nm chips made by contract manufacturer TSMC in the iPhone 15 models due next week.
While SMIC is still a long way from challenging TSMC’s lead, TechInsights vice chairman Dan Hutcheson said Huawei smartphones “demonstrate what the Chinese chip industry can do without access to the latest EUV lithography tools.” Technological progress achieved”.
Washington is trying to block the export to China of EUV machines developed by Dutch equipment maker ASML that are necessary for high-volume manufacturing of chips at the 7nm and below nodes.
Hutchison said the development could prompt countries to impose “tighter restrictions than they currently have” to further limit China’s access to key manufacturing technologies.
Sullivan said on Tuesday that the U.S. would maintain a “‘small yard, high fence’ set of technical constraints, primarily focused on national security concerns,” rather than “commercial decoupling.”
In 2019, Washington imposed sanctions on Huawei, barring the company from sourcing from the United States advanced chips, equipment and software used to make 5G smartphones, forcing it to switch to selling 4G equipment and focus on the domestic market.
TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a research note that the phone’s launch could revive Huawei’s smartphone business, which has suffered from a sales slump due to U.S. sanctions.
Kuo predicts that Huawei will ship 6 million units within four months of the Pro launch, helping its overall handset shipments increase by 65% to 38 million units this year. He predicts that it will become “the mobile phone brand with the strongest growth in global shipments” amid declining smartphone sales.
The release of the smartphone sparked patriotic enthusiasm for its “Made in China,” sparked a firestorm of appreciation on social media, and instantly sold shares. It also boosted the share of Huawei’s component suppliers. The FactSet China Semiconductor Index, which tracks China’s largest chipmaker, outperformed Chinese stocks, rising more than 9% since last week’s smartphone launch.
Additional reporting by William Langley and Gloria Li in Hong Kong
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