Have Huawei’s domestic manufacturing partners somehow developed the means to mass produce a 5nm laptop chip despite US sanctions intended to prevent this? No, that’s definitely not the case.
According to a teardown of Huawei’s Qingyun L540 laptop by TechInsights testers, the mysterious 5nm Kirin 9006C processor inside was actually made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, not a manufacturer in the Middle Kingdom .
When the 14-inch ultralight first appeared in early December, the presence of a 5nm processor sparked furious speculation that China’s domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity was far more advanced than previously thought.
This speculation was understandable since a few months earlier, Huawei launched the Mate 60 Pro smartphone powered by a 7nm system-on-chip apparently manufactured by China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC).
SMIC has been rumored to have been developing the means to produce 7nm process technology for some time, but Huawei’s Kirin 9000S was one of the first examples of it being put into production. But the 9006C seems to be a different story.
An investigation into the origin of the underlying silicon showed that “the analysis confirms with high confidence that the HiSilicon Kirin 9006C is indeed manufactured by TSMC, thus dispelling debates about SMIC’s involvement.”
The laptops’ processor strongly resembles the HiSilicon Kirin 9000 that was packaged in the 35th week of 2020, the team concludes. “The die uses the same BEOL [back end of line] stack and process node reported by TechInsights for the Kirin 9000 processor.”
In the years since the U.S. raged, the Trump and Biden administrations have gradually tightened export controls on Chinese designers developing domestic semiconductors. Recently, Biren and Moore Threads, two of the Middle Kingdom’s most promising GPU suppliers, faced similar sanctions after the US Department of Commerce placed them both on its “entity list”.
The register asked Huawei for comments on the origin of the L540’s processor; we’ll let you know if we have any news. ®
